Down With Love - A Workshop with Kathi Weeks (ausgebucht)

This workshop, with feminist political theorist Kathi Weeks, will take place in two halves. The first will involve a discussion based around a short input by Weeks titled, "Down With Love: Feminist Critique and the New Ideologies of Work". In her talk, she will draw on the 1970s feminist critiques of love, romance, and feminine fulfilment to develop a critique of the popular mandate to 'love your work' and the burgeoning literature on 'happiness at work'. 

The second half of the workshop will entail a discussion of Weeks' article, "The Vanishing Dialectic: Shulamith Firestone and the Future of the Feminist 1970s". The essay explores Shulamith Firestone's 1970 book, The Dialectic of Sex in order to examine the relationship between feminism's recent past, its present, and possible futures. "Rather than conceive 1970s feminism as either a dead relic of a superseded past or a living legacy," Weeks writes, "the analysis experiments with temporalities of feminist theory that might better account for both continuity and rupture, for our attractions and repulsions to different moments." The text also touches on several issues of central concern to the collective Kitchen Politics - Queerfeministische Interventionen, co-organisers of the event. This includes the relationships and tensions between a Marxist and a feminist politics in the 21st Century, questions of reproductive labour and technologies, the family and communities of care.

Kathi Weeks is a Professor with the Program in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University and the author of The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries as well as Constituting Feminist Subjects. She is also editor of a recent collection of texts on "The Politics of Public Bathrooms", published in South Atlantic Quarterly.

The workshop is organised by the Bildungswerk Berlin der Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung and Kitchen Politics - Queerfeministische Interventionen. The event has been made possible through funding from the Stiftung Deutsche Klassenlotterie Berlin. It is free, but registration is essential. Please note that places in the workshop are limited to 25.