Dienstag, 05. November 2013, 18:00 - 20:00 iCal

Cecilia Åsberg: Practicing posthumanities:

Feminist science/cultural studies and its queer questions to nature, ethics and inter-disciplinarity

Hörsaal B, Campus der Universität Wien, Hof 2
Spitalgasse 2-4, 1090 Wien

Vortrag


Taking a starting point in how feminist gender studies (FGS), cultural studies (CS), and science and technology studies (STS) have re-invented its core analytical concepts and reconfigured interdisciplinary research in the humanities and social sciences, this lecture examines the possibilities for practicing a critical and creative form of the posthumanities today. In this lecture we look first at the basics of “the body trouble” of feminist analysis, especially from the vantage point of feminist science studies. As such, it turns into a larger question of nature, of the very nature of nature (ontology), the culture-of-no-culture (natural science) and the post-natural as approached in queer feminist cultural theory. But the ontological questions within feminist theory (emerging as new materialisms), inseparable from epistemological questions, have also given rise to ethical questions. Especially if posed in relation to “the posthuman”. But what does that imply? Well, as humans – in our gendered, racialized, animalized, medicalized, acclimatized and “civilized” corporealizations – are more and more obviously entangled in co-constitutive and reciprocal relationships with technology and science, with other animals and with the environment, anthropocentric approaches (and unreflected humanisms) have simply become difficult to sustain analytically.

The posthuman and various posthumanisms appear thus on the methodological horizon as a promising monster. Indeed a hydra with many heads; this is a promising monster already in action within the critical and creative humanities eg in the shape of human-animal studies (HAS), medical humanities, or science and literature studies (SLS). But what are the affordances, risks and limitations involved in such posthumanist exercises of interdisciplinarity? It is from such questions, with analytical concepts and coordinates from aforementioned interdisciplinary approaches, and with examples from popular culture, the science laboratory, the technoscience of genetics and Alzheimer’s Disease, that this lecture aims to map out the emerging analytical toolbox of a feminist form of the posthumanities.

Cecilia Åsberg, Associate Professor (Docent), PhD, MA, Department TEMA - Department of Thematic Studies: Interdisciplinary Gender, Linköping University (Sweden); LiU-scholar (Future research leaders of Linköping University); Director of The Posthumanities Hub; Editor-in-Chief of NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research (Routledge:Taylor & Francis), and Deputy Head of Tema Genus. Recent publications: Cecilia Åsberg (2013) "The Timely Ethics of Posthumanist Gender Studies", in feministische studien 2013:1, pp 7-12; An introductory textbook to critical posthumanist theory and material-semiotics "Posthumanistiska nyckeltexter" (Studentlitteratur 2012) by Cecilia Åsberg, Martin Hultman & Francis Lee.

Zur Webseite der Veranstaltung


Veranstalter

Referat Genderforschung


Kontakt

Sushila Mesquita
Referat Genderforschung
4277-18455
sushila.mesquita@univie.ac.at