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Judith Butler speaks about The Politics of the Street and New Forms of Alliance

Wednesday, 7th September 2011

Judith Butler – The Politics of the Street and New Forms of Alliance

Upcoming lecture as part of OCA's 'The State of Things' / Norway at La Biennale di Venezia
Wednesday, 7 September / 18:00
Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Campo Santa Maria Formosa, Castello 5252, Venice

Gender theorist Judith Butler speaks about The Politics of the Street and New Forms of Alliance.

Although some have argued that the politics of the street has been replaced by new media politics, it seems that the public sphere within which politics takes place is now defined by a specific mode of bodies interacting with media. Hannah Arendt once argued that there could be no exercise of freedom without the creation of a 'space of appearance' and even 'a right to appear'. How do we understand those new forms of democratic insurgency that form alliances that are not in coalitional forms? Who is the embodied 'we' on the street transported through media, and yet in place and at risk?

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the Co-Director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler is the author of, among others, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (1993), Excitable Speech (1997) and Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (co-written with Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood and Wendy Brown in 2009). She is also active in gender and sexual politics and human rights, anti-war politics and Jewish Voice for Peace. Butler is presently the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities.

Visit www.oca.no/programme/norway-in-venice/venice-biennale-2011/the-state-of-things