Time and Desire in Queer Post-Cinema

Queer Post-Cinema: Reinventing Resistance offers a novel perspective on the subject of queer cinema, highlighting the interplay between the cinematic dispositif and digital media in post-cinema. The conversation between Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky and Katrin Pahl will focus on the field’s connection with subjectivation as linked to sexuality. This entanglement, which is both normative and subjugating, encompasses processes of rejection and exclusion. Deuber-Mankowsky introduces a new form of resistance in accordance with Gilles Deleuze’s interest in the techno-social mechanisms characteristic of a society of control. She argues that in the context of the current subordination of digital film, image production, big data, and AI to the capitalist regime of control and surveillance, resistance’s reinvention lies in the aesthetic function of the cinematic image. In contrast to the social purpose of the visual, the aesthetic function of the image is characterized by a ‘supplement’, a creative preservation that refers to time’s qualitative nature: enduring and coexisting, it is that of a virtual, open future, embracing queerness in time.

Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky is Professor Emerita of Media Studies and Gender Studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. She has been a visiting professor at several universities in the United States, Paris, and Indonesia. She is an Associate Member of the ICI Berlin, a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the German Historical Museum, and a member of the board of the Centre d’études du vivant CEV/Université Paris Cité. Her research focuses on topics in critical, feminist, and queer theory, media philosophy and epistemology, temporality and media aesthetics, philosophy of technology as well as Jewish Philosophy. Her latest publications include Queeres Kino/Queere Ästhetiken als Dokumentationen des Prekären, co-edited with Philipp Hanke (ICI Berlin Press, 2021), and the essay ‘“New Stars Were Rising in the Sky”: On Benjamin’s Concept of Cosmic Experience and Technology around 1930’, in Technics: Media in the Digital Age, ed. by Nicholas Baer and Annie Van den Oever (Amsterdam University Press, 2024).

Katrin Pahl is Professor of German and Gender Studies at the Johns Hopkins University. She received her PhD from the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley and has served for many years as co-director of JHU’s Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality. The arc of her research is situated in the field of affect and emotion studies with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. Pahl was awarded the Best Article in Feminist Scholarship Prize from the Coalition of Women in German for ‘Transformative Translations: Cyrillizing and Queering’ and has given the Kenneth Weisinger Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley. She was a Fellow of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Languages of Emotion’ at the Freie Universität Berlin and a Senior Fellow at the IKKM, Weimar. Her latest book is titled Sex Changes with Kleist (Northwestern UP, 2019). Two recent articles, “Blood Run Beech Read: Human–Plant Grafting in Kim de l’Horizon’s Blutbuch”, in Open Cultural Studies and “Improbable Intimacy: Otobong Nkanga’s Grafts and Aggregates”, in Theory and Event, contribute to her current research on ‘Transgenerational Trauma and Queer Lives’.