Torsten Lange: Queer Ecologies of Care - přednáška ve VI PER

Péče and its spatial dimension have become a key issue in recent years, not least in connection with the Covid pandemic. However, care and space do not exist outside the dispositions of gender and sexuality. Against the backdrop of the current "crisis of care," this lecture will explore the possibilities of re-evaluating care and social reproduction from a queer perspective. It will focus on various examples of "social infrastructures" of LGBTQ during the period between the liberalization of lesbians and gays and the HIV/AIDS crisis (from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s) and on the spatial practices that contributed to their creation and constant transformation. I will argue not only that it is important to pay attention to the social and material ecology that sustains these infrastructures and their specific communities of users. I will also ask how the first can disrupt and destabilize normative, gendered (and often racially conditioned) understandings of care, while simultaneously allowing us to develop a relational conception of queer spaces.
Torsten Lange teaches cultural and architectural history at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Lucerne, Switzerland. He studied architecture and the history and theory of architecture at the Bauhaus University in Weimar and at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, where he received his PhD in 2015. In his work, he focuses on the conditions that underpinned the production of the built environment during the late socialism period and on writing the history of queer spatial practices. He is the co-editor of the book Re-Framing Identities: Architecture’s Turn to History (2017), a special issue titled "Architectural Historiography and Fourth Wave Feminism" of the journal Architectural Histories (2020), and a recent issue titled "Care" of the journal gta papers (2023), and he has also published several essays and articles.