From Square To Square: Sex and the Social Experiment in China and Hong Kong (key-note lecture by Katrien Jacobs)
The talk will meander from China’s compulsive call for marriage partners on
public squares to borderland visions of moral dissolution and obscenities on
occupied squares during the Hong Kong Umbrella movement of fall 2014. At the
same time I will track my own evolving interests in an intellectual pornosphere
that started in Amsterdam in 2005 and went through permutations and paranoia as
I moved to Hong Kong.
The urban gatherings and post-disciplinary pedagogy that sprung up during the
Hong Kong movement also resonates with city occupations against monopolies and
student occupations in different cities. The Hong Kong occupation was a moment
of intense political transformation and enactment of a new Chinese socialism,
even though the request for political autonomy from authoritarian China has
been indefinitely denied. But rather than arguing that the occupied square
offers ultimate sexual enlightenment, it promotes wandering through cultural
fields, reflecting on nation-state obsessions and a radical queering of the
socialist intellectual.
The talk will meander from China’s compulsive call for marriage partners on
public squares to borderland visions of moral dissolution and obscenities on
occupied squares during the Hong Kong Umbrella movement of fall 2014. At the
same time I will track my own evolving interests in an intellectual pornosphere
that started in Amsterdam in 2005 and went through permutations and paranoia as
I moved to Hong Kong.
The urban gatherings and post-disciplinary pedagogy that sprung up during the
Hong Kong movement also resonates with city occupations against monopolies and
student occupations in different cities. The Hong Kong occupation was a moment
of intense political transformation and enactment of a new Chinese socialism,
even though the request for political autonomy from authoritarian China has
been indefinitely denied. But rather than arguing that the occupied square
offers ultimate sexual enlightenment, it promotes wandering through cultural
fields, reflecting on nation-state obsessions and a radical queering of the
socialist intellectual.