What is Coalition? Reflections on the Conditions of Alliance Formation with Judith Butler’s Work - European Conference on 14 / 15 May – Public Lecture on 14 May 2012
Post Date:
04.05.2012 Conference conception by Professor Delphine Gardey, Institute for Gender Studies, Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences, University of Geneva and Professor Cynthia Kraus, Institute for Social Sciences, University of Lausanne
Deadline for registration: 8 May 2012
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Summary:
In her groundbreaking book, Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler inaugurates and develops her critique of foundational reasoning – of identity categories such as (biological) sex, or of a transcendental subject such as “the woman” or even
“women” (in the plural) – as a critique of identity politics in general, and of a women’s identity-based feminism in particular.
For this reason, her antifoundationalism appears as a critical practice that seeks not only to rethink the political – along with genders, bodies, subjects and agency – in terms of performativity rather than of representation, but also, and most importantly,
to theorize alternatives to identity politics in terms of coalition building. Since then, we can consider that Butler has insistently returned to the action-oriented question of “what is coalition?” and further elaborated on the conditions of possibility of alliance formation – at least, as much as on the conditions of subversion – in order to move effectively toward what she calls a “progressive” or “radical democratic politics.”
This conference aims to reflect – historically, sociologically, philosophically – on the conditions of possibility, on the objects, means and purposes of alliance formation – between minorities, with the State, political parties, and other public actors, or between disciplines, or even across species (e.g. animal-human), etc. –, of political transformation, and thus of a collective agency, in both domestic and international contexts, through the concrete and generic question of “what is coalition?” – with special interest for the ways in which critical perspectives inspired from feminist and queer theory can be made into productive tools to theorize the political at various levels, at different times and locations, but also to intervene and do better democratic
work.
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