The Professor’s Body

As bell hooks famously observed in her 1993 essay “Eros, Eroticism, and the Pedagogical Process”, the professor’s body is marked by both “repression and denial”. Caught up in the long-exhausted Cartesian split between body and mind, teaching in higher education appears to be a predominantly cerebral affair. In such an environment, the language for articulating and intervening in what the professorial body is, remains critically underdeveloped, particularly where it intersects with histories of race, gender and class.

The public program at Kunstraum will focus on the professorial body as a site of both disciplinary power and radical pedagogical emancipation. As hooks insists, there is a latent transgressiveness to higher university education that demands a critical analysis of both power and pleasure. Such an analysis must begin with the ongoing failure of many universities to address the countless examples of sexual harassment and violence experienced by women-identifying and non-binary/gender non-conforming students.[1] The continuing difficulty of hooks’ appeal, however, becomes clearer when considering the intense discussions in feminist theory and academia about student-teacher relations in cases such as Jane Gallop, author of Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, or more recently Avital Ronell, the NYU professor accused of sexual harassment by a former queer student. Echoing Amia Srinivasan’s recent call for a “sexual ethics of pedagogy”, The Professor’s Body seeks to identify the legal, social and institutional conditions necessary to differentiate discrimination from transgression.

The public program, as well as a corresponding seminar, will take place in a display and exhibition by the artist Leda Bourgogne. Besides a large-scale installation that will simultaneously serve as a classroom, a series of recent drawings and sculptures engender a sense of tactile permeability that register the otherwise invisible desires and sensibilities of students and professors alike.

Events
Alina Adrian: October 23, 6–7pm
Lecture: Sexism and sexualized violence: Recognizing the realities of higher education and developing preventative measures

Leda Bourgogne: October 23, 7–8pm
Performative reading

Franzis Kabisch: October 30, 6–8pm
Screening & conversation

Ho Rui An: November 6, 4–6pm
Screening & conversation

Rahel Spöhrer & Laura U. Marks: November 13, 4–8pm
Writing workshop: Haptic Academia

Maximiliane Baumgartner: November 20, 6–8pm
Lecture & presentation: WIE DU MIR, SO TEIL ICH DIR (TIT FOR TAT)

Continuing this semester
“What do we talk about when we talk about…” is an irregular series of close readings in response to the acceleration and polarisation of German public discourse around the escalation of violence in Palestine, Israel and the Middle East. The format seeks to return to a core competency of critical study: reading, listening and discussing texts, sharpening terms and developing concepts. The sessions will be facilitated by guests who have already published on some aspect of this long conflict. The sessions are open to all members of the University. Attendance is conditional on reading the text or book chapter provided in advance. Please register for each session at kunstraum [​at​] leuphana.de. Texts will be sent out after registration. Guests this coming fall include Nahed Samour, Dani Gal, Esra Özyürek and Charlotte Wiedemann. Previous guests included Omer Bartov, Frank Engster and Peter Ullrich. 

For more information on all upcoming events, including Kunstraum.p2p, a new format designed to support independent and collaborative study, please sign up to the Kunstraum Newsletter.

[1] A 2022 study found that 66 percent of women-identifying and 74 percent of non-binary/gender-non-conforming students in Germany had experienced sexual harassment and violence.