Queer Sidesteppers & Feminist Boss Ladies

Queer and feminist politics, thought and self-expression are continuously reconfiguring urban landscapes globally. Claiming the emancipatory promise of city life numerous queer and feminist pockets, whether in real space or on social media, show the power and potential of DIY cultural and digital spaces to question normative boundaries of the self, sidestepping restrictive notions of sexual, gendered and political identities.

But how do these radical notions of transgressive being affect or create contemporary urban socialities? Conversely, how does the city allow or restrict these transgressive bodies & politics. During the final HERA SINGLE Conference Sexing the City, The Research Center for Material Culture organizes Queer Sidesteppers & Feminist Boss Ladies. With this event we experiment, disrupt and situate the idea of Sexing the City in a global context.

We focus on questions such as: How to live, love and make love in times of precarity? What happens to those who are (in)visibly (re) producing, (re)claiming and (re)defining city life on the peripheries of societies? For Queer Sidesteppers & Feminist Boss Ladies, The Research Center for Material Culture invites artist Zinzi Minot, art historian and scholar Fatima El Tayeb, filmmaker Walker Lee, writer and artist Kareem Reid and filmmaker Oindrilla Duttagupta to destabilize normative urban narratives of urban socialities by presenting and working with moving images, films and performative gestures. Specifically, the program attempts to identify precarious, unconventional or offbeat survival strategies within global patriarchal urban settings. In this day of discussions, workshops and screenings, Queer Sidesteppers & Feminist Boss Ladies aims to become an alternative and temporal stage for a multitude of critical, queer and feminist perspectives and voices to refashion our understanding, language and doings. 

• Heidelberg University
• University of Amsterdam
• Birckbeck College (University of London)
• Fei Contemporary Art Foundation (Shanghai)
• Goethe Institut (New Delhi)
• The National Museum of World Cultures/Research Center for Material Culture (Amsterdam and Leiden)

Queer Sidesteppers & Feminist Boss Ladies is part of the concluding program of  “Creating the ‘New’ Asian Woman: Entanglements of Urban Space, Cultural Encounters and Gendered Identities in Shanghai and Delhi” (SINGLE, see also www.hera-single.de, a three-year research project funded by Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA).

Queer Sidesteppers & Feminist Boss Ladies is part of the three-day conference 'Sexing The City'.