The Queerness of Babies

Audience discussion at diffrakt | center for theoretical periphery

The Queerness of Babies places Misha Kavka, Liola Mattheis, and Diego Semerene in conversation with the audience about the figure of the baby from a trans studies and psychoanalytic perspective. What does it mean to say that the baby is essentially queer? Is there a relationship between transness and the baby?
And why is it that all sorts of moral panics are still set off when one puts “babies” and “sexuality” in the same sentence, despite Freud’s claims about infantile “perversions” building the bedrock of all human sexuality over a century ago?

These are some of the questions this event poses, as we explore the function of the baby as a screen for the contemporary subject’s fantasies. What is it that the baby can tell us—about desire, sex, and gender— that the figure of the child writ large can’t? And are we willing to hear it?

The cultural scientist Liola Mattheis is a research team member in the project Aitiologies in the Reality Narratives of the Natural Sciences: On the Epistemic Function of Origin (Re)Constructions.