May 6 to 8, 2015 Aula, University of Art and Design Linz, Hauptplatz 8

Images of sexualized violence are present in almost all media and surround us every day. They represent a part of the political space, making the question of how images of sexualized violence are used to govern highly controversial. The conference will discuss the visualization of sexualized violence across disciplines. With reference to queer-feminist re/presentation politics, the aim is to explicitly intervene in the production of future ideas/images of sexualized violence.

The conference is a cooperative event between the departments of Media Theories and Time-based Media at the University of Art and Design Linz and Linz-based queer-feminist, women's political and anti-violence institutions as well as artists and artists' groups.

kickingimages.wordpress.com/program

Concept and project management: Ass.Prof. Dr. Angela Koch

Topics

Images of sexualized violence are present in almost all media (advertising, feature and documentary films, photos/reports, TV news, information and educational posters, YouTube clips, etc.) and surround us every day. They represent a part of the political space, making the question of how images of sexualized violence are used to govern highly controversial. The planned conference will discuss the problem of visualizing sexualized violence across disciplines (queer-feminist, gender and intersectional theoretical approaches, media/art/cultural studies, artistic and filmic practice, women's and anti-violence projects)

The aims of the conference are to raise awareness of the problems of the visual representation of sexualized violence, to analyse the visualizations and to develop perspectives for a different representation. In accompanying workshops, alternative, counter-cultural images of sexualized violence will be discussed, designed and generated and a handout (brochure or handbook) on the problem area of the visualization of sexualized violence will be prepared and, if necessary, created.

To consider image production as part of a regime of representation means to take into account affirming and reproducing effects with regard to gendered, but also racialized, Eurocentric, stratified or heteronormative relations of violence and to include the production and constitution of such relations of violence through images in the analysis. "epistemic violence" (Spivak), which is based on a hegemonic enforcement of normative knowledge and knowledge practices, is therefore always to be understood as a condition of image politics

Visualizations of sexualized violence are embedded in knowledge-power complexes in that they both perpetuate and establish gender orders and hierarchies, subject-object constellations, relations of violence, and regimes of gaze and truth. Representations of sexualized violence contribute to the constitution of the meaning of sexualized violence just as much as they are the effect of previous perceptions of sexualized violence; accordingly, they shape future ideas - and thus also forms of practicing - sexualized violence. With the Kicking Images conference, we want to explicitly intervene in the production of future conceptions of sexualized violence with reference to queer-feminist re-presentation politics.

The following questions and discussion points are conceivable:
- What emancipative or enlightening power do images possess?
- What dimensions does the violence of the images have?
- Visibility of the victims versus invisibility of the perpetrators
- Can experiences of violence be visualized? - Does sexualized violence disappear in the numerical value of statistics and diagrams?
- Is the representability of sexualized violence experiencing a change/paradigm shift due to digital media? - To what extent are images of sexualized violence productive and contribute to the production of subjectivity?
- Images of sexualized violence as spectacle or commodity?
- What normative and normalizing functions do images of sexualized violence have?
- Possibilities of intervention, subversion, irritation and/or transformation of images of sexualized violence
- Perspectivization and development of other images or possibilities of representation
Interested parties

A publication is planned

Further information at: kickingimages.wordpress.com