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Drag! Queer Crossings in Global Contexts
Get PDFRecent years have marked what scholars call the drag boom: the exponential growth of drag’s mainstream popularity following the widespread visibility of drag performers on social media and the commercial success of the United States reality TV competition RuPaul’s Drag Race. As the show expands to countries including the Netherlands, Thailand, Brazil, Germany, Spain, France, and more, the dominating role of RuPaul’s Drag Race has created the impression that drag has a universal standard. Post-RuPaul, mainstream audiences have come to expect normative feminine glamour; polished lip-syncing routines; and an ultimate, perhaps reassuring, ‘reveal’. Yet such an impression fails to reflect drag’s historic and present diversity, beyond the reality TV cameras and, often, beyond the stage. From leading protests, to renouncing stigma associated with non-normative performances of gender and sexuality, to cultivating joy and defiance in the cultural spaces of ‘everynight life’, drag performers have long played vital roles in queer and trans communities. Across the globe, these cultural workers continue to navigate the persecution and praise attendant on queer aesthetics’ simultaneous criminalization and consumption. Moreover, in their full contextual complexity, practices of drag within queer and trans spaces often suggest that drag’s subversive politics may lie less in its function of troubling gender’s rigidity and more in its capacity to challenge the oppressive systems of power and attendant social inequalities that intersect with the gender binary. In the wake of the drag boom, questions of what drag performance is and does are increasingly relevant. Such questions might lead to diverse understandings of drag, including as a queer and/or trans way of doing things, a method of critique, a form of activism, and an art form with a rich legacy of deconstructing and challenging dominant norms and systems of oppression. Focusing on multi-layered contexts of queer crossings, this symposium aims to develop critical approaches to drag that incorporate its range of uses by various marginalized groups in diverse contexts globally
The Three Capucines:Minoritised Histories of Gender and Performance from Cape Town to Paris via Hollywood
No full textPlanetary Design Reclaiming Futures
Get PDFToday, many people are experiencing the uneven impacts of climate change, pandemics, wars, market crashes, biodiversity loss, and supply chain disruptions on a global scale. That a shared planetary future is, at best, uncertain is widely accepted. Governments, corporations, consultancies, and design firms are trying to tackle this uncertainty by envisioning various future scenarios and ways to get there. They are developing policies, strategies, and cutting-edge technologies to anticipate and prepare for potential future challenges while minimizing damage and maximizing profits. In response, a growing number of activists and intellectuals invest hope in design to foster political alternatives grounded in radically different ways of being and speculating on futures. The conference Planetary Design: Reclaiming Futures brings together critical thinking and doing around the role of design in making, unmaking and remaking worlds. Starting from the intersection of design, infrastructure, and the planetary environment, it offers a generative platform open to artists, academics, and activists for rethinking design’s role in producing the present and for developing alternative planetary futures. Reflecting on how design makes worlds in the 21st century requires an interdisciplinary effort that addresses it as an intersectional, multi-faceted phenomenon. Design becomes not only an object of empirical study but also a conceptual lens that might open up new ways of articulating transdisciplinary critique. A central goal of this conference is thus to open up a novel field: the planetary study of design. This aspiration motivates studying design as an expansive field of socio-material processes and place-based practices with planetary implications. The conference aims to delineate this field by focusing on how epistemological and ontological aspects of design inform our understandings of planetary change, environmental management, coloniality, governmentality, and the climate crisis but also democratic reconstruction. The insistence on ‘planetarity’ comes from a recognition that these are world-historical conditions, without overlooking the locally situated, contested, and contingent nature of their manifestations. Planetarity evokes the concepts of synchronicity, discontinuity, and friction. Supporting historically, conceptually, and ethnographically rich inquiries, the conference hopes to develop a new conversation about design that spans diverse disciplines, geographies, and methodological orientations that straddle the poetic and the pragmatic, the critical and the constructive. Thus, this gathering is at once looking ahead while also reckoning with inherited and continuing injustices that still haunt collective planetary futures
The Non-Human Standpoint:Living Environments after AI
No full textThe world is living with a tiring paradox today: the perspective of the non-human is validated as never before after AI has been widely embraced as the new ‘engine of change’. But at the same time, anti-environmental attitudes are ascending and seem to be only amplified, consolidated, and fed by the embrace of machine intelligence. How to break this coupling of two contradictory validations through ‘AI’, of the non-human perspective with withdrawal from the world? The collaborative project, ‘AI in the street’ moved into city streets to explore a different logic of activating the non-human standpoint, and this in the following ways. Walking the street, the researchers encountered AI first and foremost as a barrier to interaction, in the form of oversized 5G antenna, cluttered lampposts, and opaque road furniture. But they also encountered hesitating machines, demonstrating that technology is humbled by contingency no less than any other entity and breaking the spell of mechanical objectivity. Finally, adopting the non-human vantagepoint of the street opened up a critical perspective : assuming the vantage point of a tree, but also of a thistle, the researchers could suddenly see what technology disables, the sheer inhabitability of the place. At the same time, the time frame expanded, into what was here before and might be, what grows through the cracks. Noortje Marres’ work contributes to the interdisciplinary field of Science, Technology and Society (STS) and investigates issues at the intersection of innovation, publics, the environment and everyday life. Trained in the sociology and philosophy of science and technology, she has led research projects focused on emergent forms of public engagement in technological societies, in work on sustainable living and related practices of ‘material participation’ such as everyday carbon accounting, and more recently, automated and connected environments created in city streets. Noortje has also contributed to methods development across social research, digital media and activism, in work on online issue mapping and situational analytics. Her current research focuses on experiments ‘beyond the laboratory’, examining diverse forms of testing in societal settings – street trials of intelligent vehicles, fact-checks in media environments and Covid testing situations – as critical interfaces between science, engineering, nature and society. Much of her work, then, is concerned with experiments in society as forms of knowledge, intervention and engagement that are gaining fresh relevance in our compute-intensive, ecologically challenged age
Fairy Castles Gliding Like Swans:A Meditation on Drawing While Writing
Get PDFWhile Michael Taussig writes a book-length account in Istanbul of his time in a village in northern Colombia besieged by paramilitaries, he draws what is happening outside his window. How these two channels of image and text come, don’t come, and partially come together is the elusive subject of this talk, resonant with the precarity of the villagers in such a situation no less than of the images emitted through the interstices of the text. How could these different states of awareness coexist, intermingle, and even feed off one another? In this regard, one thought came to stand out and that was his becoming aware of scale. Michael Taussig is Class of 1933 Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Columbia University, NYC, and is known through his several idiosyncratic books from 1980 onwards concerning The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, The Nervous System, Mimesis and Alterity, The Magic of the State, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia, I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown, And the Garden is You, and Corpse Magic: Ecoes Active in the Slayer-Slain Nexus
Berlin’s Killjoys:Feminist Art from the Global South
Get PDFIn this reflection piece, I look at the feminist artistic landscape emerging in Berlin with its growing, diverse migrant community. I examine the ways in which women* artists challenge the imposed notions of their migrant status in the city and their states of belonging within it. I demonstrate this through two feminist initiatives I have been involved in that aim to amplify the voices of women* artists whose creative practices disrupt carefully constructed frameworks relating to borders of inclusion and exclusion. I argue that the artistic practices of women* in these networks are killjoy because they unapologetically get in the way, dismantling carefully constructed frameworks that delineate borders of inclusion and exclusion. By reflecting on homemaking practices in exile, I exemplify how feminisms from the global south decentralize claims to truth by taking the means of production into their own hands. By framing the chapter around the recent protests in Berlin unfolding in solidarity with the feminist revolution in Iran, I reveal the possible limits of such actions when they do not embrace intersectionality. Ultimately, I propose to invest in feminist artistic practices that destabilize exclusionary politics by creating visibility and bridging theory and practice
Kill your Darlings (Working Title)
Get PDFThe following think piece explores what it means to exist in a culture of idols by questioning the universalistic practice of canonization. By rejecting homogenous Eurocentric thinking, this piece makes room for the voices of plurality and collective thinking with each other. To this end, it relies on feminist praxis to criticize the genius-based, self-contained understanding of creativity and success perpetuating within contemporary scientific research. Indeed, it presents a case for cultivating cultures of failure within academia and demonstrates with its own stylistic development how cultivating a stream of thoughts can speak to the fragmented and collective nature of the entangled process of thinking and writing
Trails and Ruins:Poetry and Poetics of Place
No full text‘They were inhabiting a city radiating with multiple and multilexical and multistratigraphic nostalgias’, the poet Donna Stonecipher writes. This literary reading externalizes these multiplicities and features poets whose forms range from the acutely lyrical to the annotational. Spanning three languages, the disparate syntactic proclivities and thematic preoccupations of these writers unambiguously constellate around matters of place. The poems to be showcased in this event, when read collectively, conjure up a variety of affective states that inform the poetic subject’s entanglement with milieu—private or urban or macrocosmic or speculative—and their articulations of embeddedness, relocation, and dislocation. Joining Stonecipher are Johannes Heldén and Jaya Jacobo: the three will offer succinct reflections about how their respective notions of space and habitation are crystallized in their literary production, and they will read a selection of their poetry. Johannes Heldén is a writer, visual artist, and musician. His interdisciplinary works deals with poetry, ecology, algorithms, sentience, and narrative structures. Recent projects include Astroecology which was published simultaneously in three languages, made into an interdisciplinary performance at The Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm and a digital artwork published by Bonniers Konsthall. He has published seventeen books, four music albums, and seven digital online works of poetry and visual art. Jaya Jacobo is a Lecturer in Gender Studies at Coventry University, where she currently does work on trans feminist pedagogies in literature, art and performance. She has worked alongside travesti and transsexual women artists, academics and community workers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as well as with trans, queer and nonbinary Filipina/x/o performers from the Philippines and its diaspora. Jacobo was a former Board Member of the Society of Trans Women of the Philippines (STRAP), a former President of the Film Desk of the Young Critics Circle (YCC) of the Philippines, a Founding Co-Editor of Queer Southeast Asia: A Transgressive Journal of Literary Art and Co-Editor of BKL: Bikol/Bakla, Anthology of Bikolnon Gay Trans Queer Writing. Jaya has also just released Arasahas, her debut volume of poetry in Filipino from Savage Mind Publishing House. Donna Stonecipher grew up in Seattle and Tehran. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Ruins of Nostalgia (2023), which was named one of the best books of the year by NPR, and Transaction Histories (2018), which was listed by The New York Times as one of the 10 best poetry books of 2018. Her poems have been translated into seven languages. She has also published one book of criticism, Prose Poetry and the City (2018). She translates from German, and her translation of Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker’s trilogy études, cahier, and fleurs, for which she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, is being published by Seagull Books. She lives in Berlin
Recognition
Get PDFConstitution as a viable social subject is dependent on being recognized by others as such, whether that recognition takes the form of an ethical gesture, a political objective, or a legal instrument. The desire for recognition is therefore often assumed to be universal. For many activists and theorists, recognition of rights and identities has been at the heart of social justice movements, particularly since the 1980s. This is reflected, for example, in the ‘gay rights’ slogan, ‘recognize our relationships’. Yet, appeals to recognize what certain groups have in common tend to be made at the expense of more widely expanding the range of lives that might be acknowledged as possible and worthy of protection. Moreover, the identificatory categories through which rights claims can be made often fail to map onto the actual lived experiences of those they purport to describe, suggesting that becoming socially legible as part of a group can come at the expense of true recognition as an individual. In such ways and more, the demand for recognition is inherently intertwined with a dimension of conflict and often manifests as a struggle. This symposium aims to develop critical approaches to the concept of recognition, exploring the potential gains and losses when historically marginalized groups attain social, political, or legal legibility
