Gender revisited. Negotiating gender in the age of posthumanism
Cooperation partner Graz: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hildegard Kernmayer, Institute of German Studies
Junior Fellow: Marietta Schmutz, MA
Incoming Senior Fellow: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Anna Babka, Department of German Studies, University of Vienna
Incoming Junior Fellows: Mag. Jasmin Doubek (University of Vienna), Julia Lingl, MA (University of Vienna)
Period: October 2019 to December 2020
Symposium: 10-12.12.2020, details at www.posthuman-genderstudies.at/conference
Content:
The feminist theoretical tradition of the second women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s, with its tendency towards a binary-hierarchical conception of gender, problematized the concrete exclusion of women from the public sphere on the one hand, and the symbolic exclusion of a 'female alterity' in the patriarchal social order on the other. This concept was sometimes reflected in the political endeavor to find female agents in art and society as representatives of (agency) power or to endow them with (agency) power. At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, the binary conception of gender was adopted by several cultural and gender theory positions: Feminist deconstructionism and the postcolonial studies resulting from it, which seek to dissolve all subject positions, understand even biological gender as a language-generated construction that is constantly produced anew in performative acts (Butler). For neo-materialism, however, such discourse theories are now proving insufficient to explain the interplay of meaningful-symbolic processes and material orders. In view of global economic processes, technological innovation and digital networking in the information and communication age, the concept of a posthuman subject (Braidotti) is proposed, which interacts with other subjects (human and non-human actors) - humans, animals, things - in de-hierarchized networks (Haraway, Latour, Barad). Posthumanist theories generally not only question the stability of the individuated, liberal self, but also draw attention to the materialization modes of late capitalism, such as climate change or digitalization. The project poses the question of how the category of gender is renegotiated under 'posthumanist' conditions. The subject of the investigation is
- the gender theory discourse itself: Thus, the (supposedly) competing theoretical models of deconstructivism or postcolonial studies on the one hand and the approaches of new materialism on the other are to be subjected to a revision and an analytical toolkit is to be developed that is suitable for grasping 'gender' in the interplay of meaningful-symbolic processes and material orders;
- those representations of gender that arise under the conditions of post-humanism in literary-artistic and (everyday) cultural productions. Art in particular is understood as a form of knowledge that surpasses scientific or everyday knowledge.
Interview with Dr. Kernmayer:
How does a highly technologized environment change the view of the body? Why are power relations (still) conveyed via gender? In this video, Dr. Hildegard Kernmayer answers these questions and talks about the research project "Gender revisited. Verhandlungen von Geschlecht im Zeitalter des Posthumanismus".
Take a look at the transcripted video: Download