Keynote 1 | Take my Breath Away:
Queer World-Making and this Mess that is Desire
João Florêncio and Liz Rosenfeld
23.09.2026 |19:00 | Bäckerei Kulturbackstube
“Queerness is not yet here” (Muñoz 2009, 1) may be said to sustain, as an axiom, contemporary investments in queer world-making. Often framed as a particular kind of investment in futurity, this queer orientation, at once political and affective, towards a more capacious world to come is often understood as a life-affirming alternative to the pull of negativity others have described as the true nature of desire (Edelman 2004; Berlant and Edelman 2014). Cuddly unicorns, pillow palaces, and safe spaces are thus presented to us today as queer spatiotemporal orientations toward the social in the future tense, wholesome alternatives to bored & horny scrolling on hookup apps, drug-fuelled orgies in a basement, or the relentless commodification of bodies, desires, and pleasures. Yet, many of today’s queer practices orientated towards the future appear to rely on fantasies of autonomy, psychic unity and coherence, and self-sameness that seem to us to be at odds no only with many of the core postulates of queer studies but also with the reality of queer lives themselves. Namely, that queerness is a destabilising force animated by the messy incoherence of desire, one that rejects being captured by the edifices of identity or representational politics.
In our performance-lecture we ask, “what does it mean to desire breathlessness?” What does it mean to desire one’s own undoing in the context of a queer orientation towards the future and a queer politics that often appears too sure of itself, too certain of itself, as if we all knew what a better world looks like, as if such vision would by default smoothly align itself with the wants of our bodies, the resonances of our flesh?
Through text spoken, read and recorded, through images still and moving, thorough sounds uttered, gasped and moaned, we dig holes in our queer world-making and we jump in them headfirst, always refusing to fill them up afterwards. We stick with the holes and their traces, we stay with the trouble (Haraway 2016). We hornily corrupt our own orientations towards the future, embracing its promise as the promise of an abyss.
Bios:
João Florêncio is Professor of Gender Studies (Sex Media & Sex Cultures) at Linköping University, Sweden. Trained in queer studies, cultural studies, and visual cultures, João’s work is concerned with the ways in which the queer body has been produced, policed, and contested as a political site of creative and affective sexual world-making in modern and contemporary cultures. He is the author of Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig (Routledge, 2020).
Liz Rosenfeld is a London/ Berlin based interdisciplinary artist and educator who works with performance, moving images, drawing and experimental writing practices. Their work addresses the sustainability of emotional and political ecologies, cruising methodologies, past and future histories in regard to the ways in which memory is queered. They hold an MFA in Performance (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), an MA in Performance Studies (NYU) and will start their doctoral studies at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University in late 2026. João and Liz are the authors of Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising (Rutgers University Press, 2025).
Keynote 2: N.N.
Stella Nyanzi
25.09.2026 |11:45 | Audimax der Medizinischen Universität Innsbruck
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