Vita

Brigitte Bargetz currently is postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences/Political Science at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. From 2013–19, she was assistant professor in the Department of Political Science of the University of Vienna. She also serves as co-editor of the feminist journal Femina Politica. She studied political science and history at the University of Vienna and the IEP Aix-en-Provence (France) and received her PhD in political science from the University of Vienna in 2011. Her dissertation on the everyday as a crucial concept for political theory (Ambivalenzen des Alltags. Neuorientierungen für eine Theorie des Politischen) received the 2011 Award of Excellence of the Austrian Ministry of Science and Research.

She was visiting professor at the Department of Social Sciences at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2012/13) and held research fellowships and visiting scholarships at the IFK, International Research Center for Cultural Studies, in Vienna (2009/10), at the Institute for Queer Theory in Berlin (2009), at the IWM, Institute for Human Sciences, in Vienna (2008), and at the University of Washington in Seattle (2007/08). Between 2010 and 2012 she was co-speaker of the working group Politics and Gender of the German Association of Political Science (DVPW).

A Political Grammar of Feelings

ICI Affiliate Project 2012-13

In her current research Brigitte Bargetz is interested in the question of how power, politics, and emotions are related. While Western modern thought and the politics of Enlightenment have evoked reason as a dominant political mode, excluding emotions from politics, feminist research has criticized the rational, masculinist politics of liberal theory. It has revealed how the devaluation and delegitimation of emotions is deeply imbricated in theories of the modern liberal state and how such devaluations are related to gender, race, and class. Arguing for a re-appropriation of emotions has therefore been a central aim of feminist research since the 1970s, referring to emotions not only as critical tool but also as modes of perception and knowledge and thus as mobilizing political force.

Reading the current ‘affective turn’ through such a feminist perspective aims at assessing the potentials and challenges of a theory of affective politics. For doing so, she engages with contemporary theories of radical democracy, debates about the current turn to affect and matter, as well as feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories on political feelings.

The Return of Innocence?
A Queer-Feminist Reading of the ‘Political Difference’

ICI Project 2011-12

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 re-conceptualizations.

Publications

Books / Edited Volumes

  • Dauerkämpfe. Feministische Zeitdiagnosen und Strategien, co-ed. with Eva Kreisky and Gundula Ludwig (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2017)
  • Ambivalenzen des Alltags. Neuorientierungen für eine Theorie des Politischen (Bielefeld: transcript, 2016)
  • Gouvernementalität und Geschlecht: Politische Theorie im Anschluss an Michel Foucault co-ed. with Gundula Ludwig and Birgit Sauer (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2015)
  • Femina Politica, 24.1 (2015), special issue Perspektiven queerfeministischer politischer Theorie, co-ed. with Gundula Ludwig

Articles

  • ‘Writing Out “the Social”? Feministische Materialismen im Streitgespräch’, in Materialität neu denken. Materialität anders denken — Feministische Interventionen, ed. by Imke Leicht, Christine Löw, Nadja Meisterhans, and Katharina Volk (Opladen: Barbara Budrich, 2017), pp. 133–150
  • ‘Affektive (Ver-)Führungen. Machttheoretische Überlegungen zu Heteronormativität’, co-auth. with Gundula Ludwig, Femina Politica. Zeitschrift für feministische Politikwissenschaft, 1 (2017), pp. 118–130
  • ‘Krise(n): Ausgangspunkt für eine kritische politische Theorie des Alltags’, Kurswechsel. Zeitschrift für gesellschafts-, wirtschafts- und umweltpolitische Alternativen, 1 (2015), pp. 15–23
  • ‘The Distribution of Emotions. Affective Politics of Emancipation’, Hypatia, 30.3 (Summer 2015), special issue Emancipation: Rethinking Subjectivity, Power and Change, ed. by Susanne Lettow, pp. 580–596
  • ‘Der affective turn. Das Gefühlsdispositiv und die Trennung von öffentlich und privat’, co-auth. with Birgit Sauer, Femina Politica. Zeitschrift für feministische Politikwissenschaft, 24.1 (2015), pp. 93–102
  • ‘Mapping Affect. Challenges of (Un)Timely Politics’, in The Timing of Affect, ed. by Marie-Luise Angerer, Bernd Bösel, and Michaela Ott (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2014), pp. 289–302
  • ‘Jenseits emotionaler Eindeutigkeiten. Überlegungen zu einer politischen Grammatik der Gefühle’, in Baier, Angelika/Binswanger, Christa/Häberlein, Jana/Nay Eveline Y./Zimmermann, Andrea (eds.), Affekt und Geschlecht: Eine einführende Anthologie, ed. by Angelika Baier, Christa Binswanger, Jana Häberlein, Eveline Y. Nay, and Andrea Zimmermann (Vienna: Zaglossus, 2014), pp. 117–136
  • ‘Figuring Ambivalence — Capturing the Political: An Everyday Perspective’ in Multistable Figures: On the Critical Potentials of Ir/Reversible Aspect-Seeing, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2014), pp. 191–214