Myths of sexualized transgression carry still today an air of radicality. But those which originate in the dominant historiographies of the late 1960s far too often just tell tales of unbound heterosexualities, which often seem more traumatizing than liberating: naturalized clichés of bourgeois masculinities and femininities running wild, transgressing their standardized desires for the sake of their expansion. More of the same. If there is such a thing as sexual liberation it would have to rather entail an abolition of our all too modern genders, their de-sexualization, and end to their perpetual reproduction. Our bodies still today remain violently transgressed by the modernizations of our desires, by the disciplinary confinement of sexual legibitlitiy to its relation to the two-gender model and its hetero-normative standards of procreative functionalism. We inhabit nationalized bodies, the modern sensibilities of which are indispensable parts of a colonial order. If we were to rethink a sexual liberation that is not simply another excess of modernism unbound it seems that the perspective needs to shift: from our transgressive sex, to a sex that transgresses us.

Kerstin Stakemeier is professor of art theory and art mediation at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg. She often teaches, writes, and realizes events and exhibitions in collaborations, such as Universal Receptivity (2019/20, seminar/book with Bill Dietz), Class Languages (from 2017, exhibitions/magazine with Manuela Ammer, Eva Birkenstock, Jenny Nachtigall und Stephanie Weber), Producing Autonomy (book with Marina Vishmidt, 2016), Macht des Materials/Politik der Materialität, Fragile Identitäten, Die Gegenwart der Zukunft (2014–2018, event series/publications with Susanne Witzgall). In 2017 Entgrenzter Formalismus. Verfahren einer antimodernen Ästhetik was released by b_books, 2021 Stakemeier curates Iliberal Arts at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

Entrance 4 Euro. Reduced 2 Euro. Members are free. RSVP required: mail@kunstverein-duesseldorf.de

The programm is part of the exhibition Maskulinitäten. Eine Kooperation von Bonner Kunstverein, Kölnischem Kunstverein und Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (September 1 – November 24, 2019).