ICI Edition

This talk addresses the question of the map and the territory through the intellectual and institutional history of queer studies. It has been the burden of queer thought to push back against philosophical realism and the idea that, for instance, gender is simply there, a set of incontrovertible biological facts or an ordinary feature of shared experience. The performativity thesis in queer theory has brought about a new era of gender freedom by loosening the relation between culture, language, and self-understanding from the ‘givens’ of the body, law, and history. But it has resulted in two problems, which Heather Love investigates in this talk: 1. Reference: the long-standing problem of material reality and its appearance within queer and trans theory and 2. Scale: the non-adequation between queer thought and the needs, interests, and self-understanding of the LGBT community. Love will argue that by taking the map for the territory, and representation for existence, queer scholars have not only made it difficult to address ‘bodies that matter’, they have also intensified the methodological problem of scale.

Heather Love is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania; in September 2026, she will join Rutgers University as the Kenneth Burke Chair of English. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press) and Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (University of Chicago Press). She is the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (‘Rethinking Sex’) and the co-editor (with Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus) of a special issue of Representations (‘Description Across Disciplines’). In 2023, she published Literary Studies and Human Flourishing, co-edited with James F. English (Oxford University Press). Love has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies. She is currently working on a new project (‘To Be Real’), which addresses the uses of the personal in queer criticism

The models of scientists – to be found in their diagrams, equations, maps, and even machines – can be understood as their representations of phenomena in the world. But when we look back into how scientists created those models, we often find processes of narrative-making: scientists, in seeking to understand their part of the world, create narratives about how it might work. And then, in usage, we find those model-representations becoming tools: tools of exploration, explanation and reasoning, activities that often involve scientists telling narratives with their models. So narrative resources come into two processes of scientists’ modelling: first in spinning narratives to help fashion their models of the world, and second in using narrative accounts to reason with and explore their ‘world in the model’. Models and narratives seem odd bed-fellows, but are often conjoined in the creative work of science.

Mary S. Morgan is the Albert O. Hirschman Professor of History and Philosophy of Economics at the London School of Economics; an elected Fellow of the British Academy; and an Overseas Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has published on social scientists’ practices of modelling, observing, measuring and making case studies; and is especially interested in how ideas, numbers and facts are used in projects designed to change the world. Her most recent books are How Well Do Facts Travel? (2011) and The World in the Model (2012); and the outcome of a major ERC grant: Narrative Science: Reasoning, Representing and Knowing since 1800 (edited with Kim M. Hajek and Dominic J. Berry, 2022).

The talk will be followed by a discussion moderated by Alina-Sandra Cucu and Julia Sánchez-Dorado

This event will engage with the debates surrounding Slow cinema as both an aesthetic movement and a political intervention. The discussion will focus on how extended duration and dead time in film have been seen as challenging capitalist temporalities while simultaneously risking recuperation by the very systems they purportedly resist. Works by directors like Chantal Akerman, Albert Serra, Emmanuelle Demoris, and Michelangelo Frammartino will be analysed to consider how Slow cinema’s radical engagement with the everyday — its focus on dead time and quotidian rhythms — may open up alternative ways of experiencing time and attention, yet often remains confined to exclusive art-house circuits. Slow cinema’s long takes and durational emphasis have been interpreted as producing profound shifts in spectatorial consciousness — ranging from boredom to deeper attunement with more-than-human temporalities. The event will explore what the style’s potential significance might be in our contemporary moment, and considers the possibility that such potential lies less in on-screen choices but, rather, in the urgent need to expand these alternative temporal valuations into new modes of production, distribution, and collective reception.

Rosa Barotsi is a researcher at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and Principal Investigator of the NextGeneration EU-funded project IMFilm. Her research and curatorial work explores the intersections of film, gender, and labour. She is a co-founder of the Feminist Frames network and the In Front of the Factory collective. She recently co-edited the special issue ‘Gender and Labour in the Italian Screen Industries’ in Comunicazioni Sociali (2023). She was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow and a Fellow at ICI Berlin.

James Burton is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Cultural History at Goldsmiths. A former Fellow of the ICI, he publishes work in the areas of cultural theory, process philosophy and science fiction studies, with particular interests in the cultural roles of fabulation/storytelling, critical ecology, and animism.

The concept of ‘intersectionality’ has completely transformed a wide range of disciplines over the last few decades. From literary study to sociology, intersectional approaches—approaches that demand that scholars and activists look at the interplay of multiple social identities and locations in order to understand social life—have importantly become routine. But much less attention has been given to what intersectionality was introduced to help correct: the idea of a ‘single-axis analysis’, or an approach that putatively focuses on a single dimension of social life. Instead scholars have tended to take it for granted that they know what this means: that is, a ruinous distortion of the complexity of the social world and something that should be avoided. At the same time, and in some instances departing from intersectionality, influential scholars in recent years have again deployed ideas about the singularity of foundational social formations, particularly in order to understand Blackness and Indigeneity. Focusing on Euro-American scholarly frameworks for studying gender and sexuality, this talk will turn attention to the many functions and purposes of single axis analyses in order to complicate understanding of such frameworks and to develop literacies around their various meanings.

Ben Nichols is a lecturer in gender and sexuality studies at the University of Manchester since 2021. Before this, he held a fellowship at the ICI Berlin and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. He completed his PhD in English at King’s College London. His research focuses on the intellectual histories of feminist, queer and trans studies. His monograph – Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature, and the Politics of Sameness (2020) – rethinks the deeply embedded aversion to categories of ‘sameness’ across queer studies.

Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is obsessed with questions of scale. Whether in its incessant reflection on days, weeks, months, years, minutes, or depths of fathoms and meters of altitude, the novel is driven by questions of the measurability of time and space. At the same time, one would hardly want to speak of measurability with regard to The Magic Mountain, either in terms of time or space. What, then, is this obsession with scale? The Magic Mountain, Strowick will argue, generates literary scales beyond measurability that address what the novel calls the ‘dual nature’ [Zwienatur] of time and space. The talk will explore this ambiguity of scale and its consequences for the question of narrative and the form of the novel. About 100 years after the publication of Thomas Mann’s novel, questions of scale are often discussed in theories of the Anthropocene. In fact, ‘scale critique’ is one of the most promising ways to analyse the Anthropocene. Is The Magic Mountain a setting for ‘scale critique’, an Anthropocene novel avant la lettre?

Elisabeth Strowick is a Professor of German in the Department of German at New York University. Before joining NYU, she was Professor of German and Humanities, Chair of the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures, and Co-Director of the Max Kade Center for Modern German Thought at Johns Hopkins University. Elisabeth Strowick has held numerous academic positions, including visiting professorships, at universities in the United States, Germany (FU Berlin, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin, University of Hamburg), and Switzerland (University of Zurich, University of Basel). She was awarded a Feodor Lynen Fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Yale, Johns Hopkins, 2004-2006). Her areas of expertise are German literature, culture, and thought from the 19th century to the present, with special emphasis on literary theory, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, the poetics of knowledge, and ecocriticism. She is the author of Passagen der Wiederholung: Kierkegaard — Lacan — Freud (Metzler, 1999), Sprechende Körper — Poetik der Ansteckung (Fink, 2009), Gespenster des Realismus. Zur literarischen Wahrnehmung von Wirklichkeit (Fink, 2019) and has (co-)edited numerous volumes and special issues of peer-reviewed journals. Elisabeth Strowick is currently working on a book on ‘Literary Scale Critique: The Anthropocene as Deep War Time’.