2025 Theme
Authoritarianisms and Crises of Authority: Alliances, Challenges, Futures
The last decade has witnessed an intensification of authoritarian models of governmentality and in managing populations: to a greater or lesser extent, authoritarian leaders - from the right or left, as the case may be - gain control of States via popular vote and generally, within established republican sovereignties.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx is still relevant today: are people capable of acting against their own interests? Or, is there a deep crisis of liberal democratic models and their parties, the latter so often negligent towards today’s most disadvantaged sectors of the population? How do certain violent forms of authority become desire? Might we have to think, once again, on the never univocal relationship between power, desire and interest? From our loci as researchers - professors – and activists, do we have the concepts, ideas and poetics necessary to intervene over the everyday mechanisms of this politique?
In Central America, declarations of exception that limit the rights of organization, association and protest have become the political regime by which the State is organized (El Salvador, Honduras). In Argentina, Javier Milei democratically came to power by denying the sacred core of democracy: the number and mechanisms for the forced disappearance of people during the last dictatorship. Donald Trump has won the US elections with more enraged speeches than ever, centering his political candidacy on Latinos, women of color and sexual diversity agendas, on migrants in general and their “abject forms of behavior”, and through statements worthy of a parody of Rudyard Kipling. And Jair Bolsonaro threatens to return to power to implement the “Brazilian cleanup.”
Around the world, right-wing political agendas are provoking attacks aimed at discrediting gender programs and forcing authorities to close them. The harshest has been the government of Viktor Orban in Hungary, which was mandated for both public and private universities. In Florida, New College closed its prestigious Department of Gender Studies and fired more than 40% of its professors. The ways these political groups define “gender ideology” are a direct confrontation to identities of sexual diversity and trans bodies, and attack the foundations that have given rise to feminist struggles and social transformations from activists and scholars.
The overall picture is ominous. Denial of crimes against humanity, the most hyperbolic forms of imperial racism and sexism, and eugenic and hygienic metaphors from the worst version of the 19th century, are not only installed among us, but they seem to convince. Or at least, they “speak” to large segments of the population.
How can we think about horizons from the humanities, social studies and spaces of activism? What genealogies of the archive can we reinvent? What historical imaginations, what poetics and what bodies/subjectivities can we put before this crisis? How are feminist struggles, protests and proposals –activist and academic– reissued and obscured by this usurpation of terms, truths and agendas? What can intellectuals and universities put forth and, above all, how can we make ourselves heard and what can we offer?
Making memory, unveiling aporias, and arguing with honesty remain key as a life and worth ethic, but they do not seem to be enough to capture the political desire of large sectors of the population. How do we resist in these scenarios of “anything goes,” of post-truth and public lying? How is the cultural and political battle waged in the realm of helplessness, of the return of old dreams of social elimination, control, discipline and repression? How and in what ways, in the midst of the State of Exception, is the collective defense of water, forests, seeds and common goods organized?
This edition of the Tepoztlán Institute 2025 seeks to find forms of intelligibility for a present that is sinking and a future that works collectively for others and with others; as Italo Calvino said, we care about living together, sharing and discussing among ourselves so that we can look at each other face to face and recognize, in hell, that which is not hell; and give it a place and make it grow.
Guiding Themes
1. Conceptual aphasia: theorizing the present and inventing the future in the face of the current scenario.
2. Feminisms and gender studies: agendas, activisms, and an academy that confronts the policies and vocabularies of the new right.
3. Novelties, repetitions or anachronisms? The temporality of authoritarianisms, and the history of their resistance in the Americas.
4. Reinscriptions of the past: uses of history and forms of memory in authoritarianisms, and in their resistance.
5. Connective poetics: authoritarian drifts, and their resistance in literature and artistic/cultural expression.
6. Right/Left in a neoliberal context: crisis of representation and responsibilities of liberal sectors in the legitimation of authoritarian regimes.
7. Authoritarianisms and the modulation of the archive: historical forms of authority and control; mechanisms of resistance.
8. Symbols, dramaturgy, eccentricities: legitimation of authoritarian leaders and their combat.
9. Authoritarianisms, corporalities, normativity: gender and trans bodies in dispute.
10. Racisms, class, and “the popular” in authoritarian modalities.
11. Religiosity and authoritarianisms: tense relations.
12. Chainsaws, weapons and monsters: hatred, hyperbolic violence, and authoritarian masculinities.
13. Fake news and post-truth: contempt for knowledge, universities and the “lettered city”.
14. Reinventing life: knowledge, corporalities, poetics and politics “not captured” by fascism.
15. The organization of the collective defense of water, land, and forests in authoritarian regimes.
16. No one is illegal: nation, migration and the politics of fear.