Who
Cares?

Since the beginning of the modern era, states have been preoccupied, as Michel Foucault claimed, not only with carceral justice and the general question of ‘who deserves to live’, but also with the growth and protection of the population in their biopolitical functions. While various states have long claimed their caring capacities, they do not disclose the details of their agency or the range of tools employed to target different parts of the population. When it comes to LGBTQIA+ communities, and gay men in particular, they have until very recently been subjected to carceral tools, including forced hormone treatment and compulsory admission to psychiatric clinics, by various European states, both East and West. Recent discoveries of Ewa Majewska in the archives of the Hiacynt operation, which targeted gay men in 1980s Poland, show that the police documents issued during this operation are still in use. This has led to discussions about the aims and limitations of the state’s actions towards LGBTQIA+ people, how to reclaim equality and due diligence for queer populations, and how to create and transform archives, including state-operated, grassroots, activist, and artistic ones. The discussion will address the possibilities and responsibilities of queer theory in relation to the interests of LGBTQIA+ populations, the collecting strategies of affective and institutional archives, and the ways in which resistance might include, rather than exclude, making critical, queer claims against the state.

Ewa Majewska is a feminist theorist of culture, associate professor at the SWPS University in Warsaw, and former ICI Fellow. She is the author of several books, her most recent publications are: The Caring Leviathan? Hiacynt Pink Files, Biopolitics, and the Queer Weak Resistance (Brill/De Gruyter 2026); Weak Avant-Garde? (MOCAK, 2026); and Feminist Antifascism (Verso, 2021) as well as numerous articles published in: Signs, Third Text, the Journal of Utopian Studies, the European Journal of Women’s Studies, Jacobin, e-flux, Interalia, and others. She lives and works in Berlin and Warsaw.

Antke Antek Engel (they/them) is director of the Institute for Queer Theory (iQt) in Berlin; a site where academic debate meets up with political activism and artistic/cultural practices. They received their Ph.D. in Philosophy at Potsdam University in 2001, and since then held various guest professorships in gender and queer studies. They have published widely in the fields of queer, feminist, and poststructuralist theory, political philosophy as well as visual cultural studies.

Annie Ring is Associate Professor of German and Film at University College London and a Visiting Fellow at the ICI Berlin in 2025 and 2026. She previously worked at Emmanuel College, Cambridge as Research Fellow in 2012-15 and Director of Studies in German in 2013-14. She is the author of the monographs After the Stasi (Bloomsbury, 2015), and The Lives of Others (BFI Film Classics, 2022) and co-editor of the volumes Architecture and Control (Brill, 2018), Uncertain Archives (The MIT Press, 2021) and Citational Media (Legenda Visual Culture, 2025).

Tomasz Basiuk
Nikita Dhawan
Antke Antek Engel
Ewa Majewska

Moderated by Annie Ring

ICI Berlin

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Image Credit © Sergio Frutos, Other Worlds III, from the series klebemich 07, mixed media, 2011