No human society can exist without symbolic and practical forms of everyday maintenance. It becomes alarming, though, whenever radical demands for purity take over, when announcements of a »grand purge« for the sake of pureness gain political traction, or exterminatory practices take hold to affirm and implement such purity politics. Currently, we can observe such practices being carried out by immigration authorities in the U.S. and Europe, flanked by political efforts to demarcate, divide, and destabilize alliances that are being attacked via a rhetoric of contamination and impurity.
Purity of the nation, purity of the body, purity of sexual identity, purity of political constituencies, purity of scientific findings—when literal and metaphorical hygiene is rendered absolute, when hybridity is demonized, and fantasies of extermination loom large, notions of cleanliness are often appropriated, exaggerated, and abused for questionable political projects. This conference will shed light on cultural techniques, spatial arrangements, and regimes of structure and order pursued in the name of cleanliness and purity. It will discuss how purity mania and cleansing fantasies become politically weaponized and examine the logics of scapegoating and self-victimization. In addition, the conference seeks to investigate the moral panic around notions of mixing as a call to arms for the emergence of resentment and resistance, while also exploring everyday disgust as an organizational force of microbiopolitics.
