Higher CGF Seminar: "Transgender Bodies amid the Cult of Confession and the Ontological Turn"

Prof. Ulrike E. Auga (Canterbury Christ Church University, UK)

Transgender Bodies amid the Cult of Confession and the Ontological Turn

Abstract: Michel Foucault’s unpublished lectures “On the Government of the Living” were the intended fourth volume of the History of Sexuality to appear under the title Confessions of the Flesh. In the 1980 held and 2012 published lectures he explains the historical foundations of the obedience of the Western subject. It is his idea that confession has largely shaped the ‘modern’ concept of the subject. Foucault locates these foundations in the connections between obedience and confession within early Christianity. In his genealogy of confession, he underlines that the ‘West’ developed a concept of confession as ‘liberation’, which does not hold in other contexts. The confession has both made us aware of our own subject-hood and subjected us to the powers extracting confessions. The problem is: to confess, to seek to know, and to produce the truth concerning oneself amounts to a submission. The injunction “Who are you?” is an innovation of the Christian West intended to guarantee obedience.

Jo Sol’s documentary Fake Orgasm (2010) stages performer Lazlo Pearlman who explores the subversion of confessional culture via the use of the nude transgender body. As a trans performer he experiences the strong request of the audience to confess his ‘identity’, which he resists. Pearlman performs a corporeal insurrection. In his Fake Orgasm Manifesto, he writes “Fake Orgasm uses that space to find freedom from the normative; to subvert it, defy it, redefine it; even, and in fact, to enjoy and play with(in) it, whenever, however, with - and as - whoever we please”. The presentation using film extracts elaborates how the performative and material body denounces bio-political regulations as well as the production of an ‘identitarian’ body and allows for a genealogical and critical discussion of trans bodies after the performative, material and ontological turn.

Bio: Ulrike E. Auga is Visiting Professor at the Intersectional Centre for Inclusion and Social Justice (INCISE) at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. Born in East-Berlin, she participated in the peaceful revolution in 1989 and became involved with social movements and issues of solidarity, gender and religion. She further developed her postcolonial critique when she worked for several years in South Africa, Mali, Israel, and the Palestinian Territories. She is a Gender, Cultural and Religious Studies scholar at the Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin (ZtG) and the acting President of the International Association for the Study of Religion and Gender (IARG). Her research interests include: Gender, Sexuality, Cultural Memory, Nationalisms, Fundamentalisms in Transition Contexts (South Africa, West Africa, East/West Germany); Gender, Performativity and Agency in the Visual Archive; Postcolonial, Postsecular, Gender / Queer theory development; Epistemology of Gender and Religion, new Materialism and posthuman Ontology. www.ulrikeauga.com