COVID-19 has made the topic of frailty visible and tangible.

Frailty is a daily routine. During Covid-19, it touched everyone and raised the question: how not to return to the old norms and, in general, to the terrifying construct "the body must function." Based on this, society decides who is worthy to receive help at the time of a disaster and a lack of resources.
How to accept the temporality of a "healthy" body and create an unlimited number of alternatives to access different resources? How to create a culture during disasters and emergencies, so that the future is not canceled, so that society critically examines its privileges and considers the process of creating different kinds of accessibility as part of the creative process?

Queering & Cripping - in this process, important practices that proceed from the rejection of hegemony and redefine all the established names and practices in the field of care and culture without romanticizing features/disabilities and sexuality, or rather, they abandon the term "singularity", "new body/new language", "care", "therapeutic education." The queer and crip community brings together a similar experience of oppression and interaction with punitive institutions. Feminist and queer movements began democratization of the sphere of care, making it accessible and important in
everyday life. Care Revolution is a process that has been going on since the 70s. Mad & disabled and crip movements have brought caring practices into the realm of performance and art. So they became part of the horizontal interaction of different communities, previously working against each other. With the acceptance of this frailty, care becomes an accessible and visible resource that does not need to be hidden in different places of isolation. Only in this way does the state of pride cease to be the state of privileged groups.


Moderator of the meeting: Kira Shmyreva, fluid activist and curator of the Caring Theater project, inclusion assistant.
Translation: Vica Kravtsova - researcher, NGO worker (Berlin).

Participants:
Marina Shamova - artist, choreographer. Is engaged in the practice of performance, contemporary dance and art (St. Petersburg).
Marina Israilova - art/theater critic, researcher, curator, co-editor of media KRAPIVA (St. Petersburg).
Elina Petrova is the chief playwright of the Kvartira and Conversations projects, the playwright of the Special Theater inclusive projects (St. Petersburg).
Art project “Androgyne and Centaur": Vera Berlinova (audio descriptor, artist, curator, disabled activist) and Anton Ryanov (artist, curator, participant of inclusion art projects, linguist), Moscow-Nizhny Novgorod.
Zhenya Damme - art teacher, student of the School for medical educational care (Berlin).
Miriam Cochanski - theater teacher, director, performer (Berlin).
Anna Kilina is a psychologist, body therapist, a former member of the Krug theater, a freelance performer and a queer & crip member of the Caring Theater project (Moscow).
Ksenia Zakharova - actress of inclusive theater, student of international somatic
programs "somatic body" (Saint-Petersburg).
Nadezhda Ishkinyaeva is an artist working with the topics of labor and disability, an employee of a neuropsychiatric boarding school, a participant in the "Latitude and Longitude" project, which helps unique artists.

Illustration: Frailty Scale by Nadezhda Ishkinyaeva, Miriam Cochanski, Kira Schmyreva.

The event was held in Zoom in Russian and German with simultaneous translation. Translator: Vanya Solovey, Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies, University. Humboldt (Berlin).


Speakers:
Sasha Talaver is a postgraduate student at the Faculty of Gender Studies at the Central European University (Budapest), writing a dissertation on the participation of the Soviet Women's Committee in post-war gender politics. Sasha is also the editor of a collection on the history of feminist samizdat and runs a Telegram channel: https://t.me/bessmertnyipol.

Anna Golovina is studying anthropology at the history department of Moscow State University. She is part of the side-by-side LGBT film festival team, an active member of the Memorial human rights organization and the GULAG Museum. Anna is interested in the social mechanisms of marginalization and communication between the state and minorities. More information on her channel: https://t.me/veselye_ludi.

Maria Bühner is a historian and culturologist who explores the subjectivation of female * homosexuality in the GDR. Queer feminist activist. More information is available here: https://uni-leipzig.academia.edu/MariaBuehner.

Daria Kolesova - completed her Bachelor's degree in German literary and Slavic studies at the University. Humboldt, having defended a diploma on ex- and implicit self-censorship in the correspondence between Christa Wolf and Lev Kopelev. From the beginning of her studies, she concentrates on the literature of the GDR, but still chose a master's degree "in the West" - at the Free University of Berlin. Daria works on two research projects and spends the rest of her time pursuing queer feminist activism.


Moderator:
Olesya Bessmeltseva researches women's activism in the Soviet Union and is the curator of the exhibition Leningrad Feminism 1979: https://www.leibniz-gwzo.de/.../leningradski-feminism-1979-0.

“Queer theory as an explanatory framework for the “existance of others” has existed in the West since the early 1990s. The names of Judith Butler, Yves Kosofsky Sedgwick, Elizabeth Gross and Teresa de Lauretis are also known in Russian academic circles. Though mainly among those who are engaged in gender studies. Scientific articles regularly appear in Russian, highlighting the theories of these and other Western queer theorists. However, to what extent is queer methodology applicable to Russian reality? Isn't it just another fashionable epistemological import? Is queer in Russian possible? " - this is how the preface of the publication with the same name begins, which came out in 2010.

Today, 10 years later, the question of the fate of the concept of “queer” in the post-Soviet space remains open. Does one need to think about what queer is in Russian, in Ukrainian, in Belarusian ..? When and why do we use this category? What does this term disguise? What does it make visible and what erases? We will discuss these and other issues at the discussion on June 20.


Reports were presented:
- "Queer" is dead, long live "queer"!
Timofey (formerly Valeriy) Sozaev, cultural scientist, gay activist, editor of the collection "Is it Possible to Have Queer in Russian?" (2010), co-organizer of two scientific conferences on LGBTQ studies (St. Petersburg, 2011, 2013)

- The word "queer" is its appearance, evolution, transformations and interpretations in the post-Soviet space
Marina Usmanova (Kherson), feminist, journalist, queer activist, one of the founders of the LGBT-inclusive feminist organization “Insha”

- Queer as a tool to evade the authorities
Tony Lashden (Minsk) - queer feminist, journalist and writer

- Why queer is not new LGBT: about coloniality, language, poverty and poetry
Friedrich Chernyshev (Fritz von Klein) - trans*activist, poet, author of the “Foucault in Tricot” Te;egram channel

- Queer and racial politics (what different queer genealogies can tell us about)
Lesya Pagulich - queer feminist, activist and researcher from Ukraine. Currently PhD student at Ohio State University

- Postcolonialism and queerness in art: about the elitism of the concept, the privilege of being visible and the sores of communities
Yanis Saar (Minsk) - queer artist, art activist, participant of the "Red Borshevik" project, (co)organizer of spaces and events, mother of two dogs.

- Queer migrants in Germany and distorting mirrors
Masha Beketova (born in Kharkiv, since 2004 lives in Germany) - co-editor of the volumes “We have something to say. Stories of LGBTIQ migrants from the post-Soviet space” and “Re:write”; initiator and participant of queer-feminist migrant initiatives; writing a dissertation on queer migration.

- What can be said about queer in Ukraine in the 33 degree heat
Nadiya Chushak (Kiev) - queer feminist, anthropologist

- Queer art as new patriotism. What I learned from the experience of the first Russian Queer Biennale
Boris Konakov - queer artist, activist, producer of the Queer Biennale


Moderator - Natalya Matveeva, organizer of the Togliatti feminist group, co-director of the self-organized gallery "VNORE", co-director of the initiative group "WE", artist, curator of local projects in contemporary art.