Doing ‘Kulturpolitik’

In this article I focus on the motives and practices of a group of women who ensured the continuity of the small Austrian music festival ‘Konfrontationen’ after its bankruptcy in 2007. While the association responsible for the festival was being restructured, they assumed responsibilities and re-modelled organizational practices into a cultural-political practice. I look at their agency through the lens of Judith Butler’s concept of subversive repetition. By contextualizing their practices with Austrian cultural policies that have been neoliberalized since the late 1990s, I place them in the arena of what in Austria is called ‘Kulturpolitik’: the negotiation of rivalling (world)views of what is to be understood as ‘culture’ and what the role of that culture is in society.