Sascha Siestenich (Bonn) - Temporal Entanglements – über die Verschränkung erinnerungspolitischer und utopischer Praxen im queeren AktivismusLecture language: German

5 November 2025

Photo: Sascha Siestenich

The lecture is dedicated to the question of how queer movements interweave past and future in order to design alternative social lifestyles in the present. Based on activist-collaborative ethnographic research on Prides and CSDs, queer-feminist collectives and caring-solidary relationship networks, it will be shown that queer activism is not only aimed at criticism or remembrance, but also at the prefiguration of queer utopias. These manifest themselves in a present in which movement knowledge - for example about earlier political struggles or affective practices of care work - is activated as an archived possibility and transformed into utopian action. Building on approaches to queer temporality (Muñoz, Halberstam), the article argues that queer movements move between nostalgic and utopian politics of memory and thus produce experimental forms of the convivial, the caring and the future. The analysis of these temporal entanglements makes it clear how queerness as "not yet here" (Muñoz 2009) becomes a transformative practice that makes utopian horizons of alternative social designs and ways of relating tangible - without masking the ambivalences, conflicts and fragilities of everyday life.

The complete programme of the institute colloquium can be found here.