Brigitte Bargetz

Vita

Brigitte Bargetz studied Political Science and History at the Universities of Vienna and the Institut d'Etudes Politique Aix-en-Provence. In her PhD in Political Science at the University of Vienna she was proposing “the everyday” as an informing and useful concept for (feminist) political theory. From 2005 to 2008 she was a stipendiary at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), working in an interdisciplinary project on “Gender and the Transformations of Public and Private”. She held Visiting Fellowships at the University of Washington in Seattle (2007/08), at the IWM (Institute for Human Sciences) in Vienna (2008) and at the Institute for Queer Theory in Berlin (2009). In 2009/10 she was Junior Fellow at the IFK (International Research Center for Cultural Studies) in Vienna. She is also lecturer for political and feminist theory and has taught at the Universities of Vienna and Graz.

ICI-Project

The return of innocence? A queer-feminist reading of the ›political difference‹
Currently, political theory, political philosophy, and art theory are encountering a lively debate on ›the political‹. Within these debates most approaches find a common ground in the differentiation between ›politics‹ and ›the political‹, often expressed as ›political difference‹. However, looking at this current resurgence of the political, it is eye-catching that these debates largely transpire without feminist insights. This is interesting because the political has been an important though contested concept within feminist theory and philosophy since its beginnings, just as its reconceptualizations. Thus, is this return of the political also a return of a ›conceptual innocence‹, what has particularly been called into question by feminist critiques? Taking up the feminist insight that concepts are never innocent in my project I will critically engage with selected theories of the ›political difference‹ exploring if, and how, these debates may be fruitful from a queer-feminist perspective.

Recent publications

• Politik, Emotionen und die Transformation des Politischen. Eine feministisch-machtkritische Perspektive, in: ÖZP (Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft), 2, 2010 (together with Birgit Sauer)   
• The politics of the everyday. A feminist revision of the public/private frame, in: Papkova, Irina (ed.), Reconciling the Irreconcilable, Vienna: IWM Junior Visiting Conferences, Vol 24, online 2009
• Die Politisierung des Alltäglichen. Stellungskrieg um Subjektformen, in: A.G.Gender-Killer (ed.): Das Gute Leben. Linke Perspektiven auf einen besseren Alltag, Münster (together with Gundula Ludwig), 2007