Shifting narratives: Archives, Queerness, and Violence

The last decade has seen a significant conservative backlash against women's and LGBTQ+ rights across the globe. In Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Latin America (LA), in particular, conservative political and religious actors have adopted the term ‘gender ideology’ to mobilise support for conservative and populist agendas, including the manipulation of history to suite current political narratives. In the case of many countries in CEE and LA, this means history is being re-written to serve masculinist heteronormative nationalistic goals.

In the workshop, Karol Radziszewski, the major Polish contemporary queer artist, responds to these processes by focusing on minority (LGBTQ+) voices to rewrite such narratives. The workshop will explore histories of gender-non normativity and queer activism in globally peripheral countries (CEE and LA, particularly Poland and Brasil) through the medium of zines and samizdat (1960s-to the present), photographs and video material (interviews). It will be centred around the stories queer (João Silvério Trevisan, Ryszard Kisiel) and transgender (Laerte Coutinho, Ewa Hołuszko) artists and activists who were censored and in some cases imprisoned by authoritarian (Communist/ right-wing) regimes in Poland and Brasil, in order to re-claims their place in their national histories and reflect on the meaning of their activism in the light of today’s ‘gender wars’.

The presentation is followed by the discussion with key network members Prof Flavia Biroli, Dr Felipe Bruno Martins Fernandes, Prof Agnieszka Kościańska, Dr Nicolette Makovicky, Prof Hadley Renkin, Prof Conny Roggeband.