PERFORMING MEDIA A seminar at Goldsmiths, University of London, organised by The Creative Media Forum in collaboration with the MA in Gender and Culture
Date: Thursday 15 October 2009, 4.30-6.30 Venue: Richard Hoggart Building (main building), Room 142, Goldsmiths, New Cross, SE14 6NW London How to get to Goldsmiths: http://www.gold.ac.uk/find-us/ This event is free and open to all. Programme: GUEST SPEAKER: ANNETTE SCHLICHTER, University of California Irvine ‘Sounds of Gender? Voices, Bodies and Gender Performativity’ The metaphor of ‘voice’ has been crucial in critiques of dominant regimes of the construction and representation of gendered subjects and in the struggle for self-representation of the marginalized. However, the role of the material voice in (de and re-) constructions of genders and sexualities has not been soundly interrogated since feminist and queer debates often focused on the corporeal as visual. On the other hand, recent work in African-American Studies rethinks the role of sound in cultural critique but tends to neglect its gendered dimensions. Drawing from various realms of critical theories of the body and of subjectivity, my paper will discuss the dimension of the sonic, in particular the role of the material voice and the possibilities of its technological reproduction, in Butler's influential theory of gender performativity. SARAH KEMBER AND JOANNA ZYLINSKA, Goldsmiths ‘Creative Media between Invention and Critique, or What’s Still at Stake in Performativity’ The creative media project we propose arises out of an attempt on our part to work through and reconcile, in a manner that would be ‘satisfactory’ on both an intellectual and artistic level, academic writing and creative practice. This effort has to do with more than just the usual anxieties associated with attempts to breach the ‘theory-practice’ divide and negotiate the associated issues of rigour, skill, technical competence and aesthetic judgement. Working in and with creative media is for us first and foremost an epistemological question of how we can perform knowledge differently through a set of practices that also ‘produce things’. Through instantiating this project, we are also making a claim for the status of theory as theatre, or for the performativity of all theory - in media, arts and sciences; in written and spoken forms. We are also highlighting the ongoing possibilities of remediation across all media and all forms of communication. SPEAKERS' BIOS Sarah Kember is a Reader in New Technologies of Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of two monographs, Virtual Anxieties: Photography, New Technologies and Subjectivity (Routledge, 1998) and Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life (Routledge, 2003), and co-editor of Inventive Life: Towards a New Vitalism (Sage, 2006). Her articles on feminist science and technology studies, debates between artificial life and other aspects of the convergence between biology and computer science, and photography and imaging technologies have been published in numerous journals and books. Kember is currently developing an innovative approach to the question of remediation and the ‘fusion’ of science and fiction. She is the author of the forthcoming novel entitled The Optical Effects of Lightning. Annette Schlichter is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine. Her research and teaching interests are feminist and queer theories, contemporary American Literature, theories of performance and performativity, and histories and theories of voice. She is the author of a German-speaking study on the figure of the madwoman in feminist critiques of representation and the coeditor of a German collection on feminism and postmodernism. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled Troubling Straightness, which focuses on constructions and critiques of "heterosexuality" in queer and feminist theoretical and literary writings. Parts of that project have been published in GLQ („Queer at last“: Straight Intellectuals and the Desire for Transgression“, 2004) The Journal of Lesbian Studies ("Contesting Straights: Lesbians, Queer Heterosexuals and the Critique of Heteronormativity," 2007) and Postmodern Culture ("I Can't Get Sexual Genders Straight: Kathy Acker's Writing of Bodies and Pleasures", 2007). Schlichter has also begun work on another book project which examines the material voice in, or rather its absence from, recent feminist theories of embodied subjectivity. Joanna Zylinska is a Reader in New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of three books: Bioethics in the Age of New Media (MIT Press, 2009), The Ethics of Cultural Studies (Continuum, 2005) and On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared: the Feminine and the Sublime (Manchester University Press, 2001). She is also the editor of The Cyborg Experiments: the Extensions of the Body in the Media Age (Continuum, 2002) and co-editor of Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust (University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Zylinska combines her philosophical writings with photographic art practice. Her exhibition, ‘We Have Always Been Digital’, was shown at the Shifted gallery in Melbourne in August 2009. -- Olga P Massanet ·························· www.ungravitational.net virtualfirefly.wordpress.com www.vimeo.com/ungravitational _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
