For our third speaker in the series Online Dialogues on Feminist Conflicts: ATGENDER in Conversation With… we are excited to welcome Dr Katharina Wiedlack.

After years of collaborative thinking about queer and feminist solidarity across the West/East divide, Katharina argued that queer feminist solidarity needs to be thought of as working together through difference, rather than as charity or based on shared identity and similarity. With the playful and provocative formulation of “fucking solidarity”(Wiedlack 2019), she developed a conceptualization of queer-feminist solidarity as a shared labor process acknowledging both material question about resources, skills and privileges and feelings of frustrations, disappointment and failures as intrinsic to solidarity work. What has changed since then? How does this concept help us think about queer-feminist solidarity now?  

This event is open to all but advanced registration is required. To register for a place, please register here before Tuesday 28 April, 23:59 CET: https://forms.gle/cwotiEBGBKTHh6SZA 

Title: Queer-Feminist Solidarity in Times of Despair?

Wednesday 29th April 2026, 4pm – 5.30pm CET

Katharina Wiedlack (Department ofEnglish and American Studies, University of Vienna)

Abstract: In my talk, I want to ask what gender studies and research offer to not only survive, individually, but also create a network of resilience and mutual aid that can become a bulwark for solidarity beyond its institutional borders. In a moment of acute panic, about the state of the world, and against the background of careerism, gate-keeping, classism, “first-worldism,” racism, and ableism within European academia, including gender studies, I want to ask what concrete strategies we need to develop to continue working together through differences while securing the infrastructure we have already built. What kind of solidarity do we need, while our access to resources – financial, emotional, physical – is being cut off? How can we resist academic individualism and competitiveness in favor of collaboration and mutual support in this situation? I will offer my thoughts and ideas towards answering these questions by drawing on Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s theoretical and practical work on care work and disability justice, Paola Bacchetta’s thinking about queer alliances, and Dean Spade’s concept of mutual aid. Moreover, following disability, queer and gender studies scholars who aim to dismantle North-Western hegemonies, such as Kateřina Kolářová, Maria Mayerchyk, and Olga Plakhotnik, I ask how care work, queer alliances, and mutual aid can be applied to, or together with, the deconstruction of gender studies’ continued privileging of North-Western epistemologies. Rather than presenting a fully developed theocratization, I hope to inspire a lively discussion and exchange with the audience and possibly a collective process of building solidarity.

Bio: Katharina Wiedlack (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9236-8819) is Assistant Professor of Anglophone Cultural Studies at the Department ofEnglish and American Studies, University of Vienna. Her research focuses primarily on queer and feminist theory, issues of in_visibility, popular culture, postsocialist, decolonial, and disability studies. She recently published her latest monograph, Under Western Eyes: Vulnerable Minorities and the Russian State in New Cold War Cultures (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2025).

The discussion will be facilitated by Lucie Naudé (Department of Political Science, Univeristy of Vienna), board member of ATGENDER.

This event is open to all but advanced registration is required. To register for a place, please register here before Tuesday 28 April, 23:59 CET: https://forms.gle/cwotiEBGBKTHh6SZA 

If you have any questions about the event, please email: info@atgender.eu.

This event is organised by ATGENDER, the European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation. ATGENDER is a membership-funded organisation. To support ATGENDER’s work, please consider joining as an ATGENDER member: https://atgender.eu/membership/register-as-new-member/ 

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