Mission
The International Research Center – Gender and Performativity (ICGP) is an mdw research institution for interdisciplinary research and teaching in gender studies at the interface of performance and theater studies, film and media studies, and musicology. Our work is focused on the performing arts, political forms of performance, and theories of performativity. Based at the Department of Cultural Management and Gender Studies (IKM), we aim to advance and connect globally, critical approaches to gender, queer and trans studies and to examine the staging of gender and desire in different historical, geographical and institutional settings.
We look forward to discussing these issues with you in our events and in classes that are also open to students from other universities. As the only art university in Austria, the ICGP offers the opportunity to obtain a doctorate in Gender Studies with a corresponding profile. Researchers from our working field that are interested in collaboration and seek funding are warmly invited to get in touch with us. We are happy to advice concerning the possibility of establishing a research project at ICGP and to support third party funded projects in the application processes and, if funding is successfully acquired, infrastructure (rooms, publication funding, etc.).
The ICGP explores the artistic negotiation of social, political, and ecological challenges and their gendering. In particular we are interested in how these challenges find form in theater, performance and film, in the ways in which they are performed. Research and teaching encompass work on artistic materials and processes, their historical and social conditions, questions of aesthetics and mediation.
This includes a critical engagement with structural violence such as racism, ableism, classism and antisemitism, taking into account queer, feminist and postcolonial theory. We also examine performative practices beyond the art world in the conventional sense as (gender-)political stagings, whether on the street or in media spaces.
Point of departure for our research is the specific social situatedness of every form of appearance and performance. Following this insight, we work on the expansion of queer-feminist theory of performativity, including perspectives on choral, collective forms of appearance, multidirectional entanglements of cultural performative techniques, materialistic readings of the environmental humanities and research on fascism and populism – especially in the face of the current authoritarian drift, which is particularly targeting critical gender studies.