Based on ethnographic research in Amman, this lecture engages with performance and performativity of gender and citizenship in art spaces and everyday life. What is your personal map of the city? How do you navigate it? What does it mean to belong to a city? How is belonging or not belonging affected by the body and languages I/you inhabit? The lecture explores how gender and belonging shape the experience of citizenship. Specifically, the ways space and gender co-constitute each other in Amman and elsewhere to interrogate notions of fiction and real.

Hanna Al-Taher. political scientist. playwright. translator. currently doctoral researcher and lecturer at JLU Giessen and MPhil student at SOAS London. researching performativity, space and gendered citizenship.

The event is part of the third phase of our 2019 program at The Lab, bringing together artists and cultural practitioners that look at the production and reproduction of a hegemonic gender space, and explore tactics of subversion and negotiation.

From meditations on the role of myth and fiction and the simulation of buried histories, to interventions made on existing legal texts and the use of new media technologies, the multifaceted program evokes new forms of belonging that transgress normative frameworks and categories and address the intersectionality of gender, race and class.

Accompanying discursive events carve up a critical space that moves beyond mainstream, neoliberal and neocolonial perspectives on gender relations, drawing instead on alternative discourses from the periphery.