A SPELL TO BIND ALL MALE CONFERENCE PANELS: A site specific performance/paper

• In Event: Post-Cyber Feminism: Mutations in Australian Feminist Technoscience

Abstract

A site-specific performance/paper

The virus’ life is continual reproduction, and so she festers, feeds, multiplies in the technologies of Oedipal teleologies father fucking father killing daddy daddy oh daddy Oh! Oh! Oh! Every time a white man born a man cites a man born a man cites a man again every time a translucent male artist or academic or scientist references another pallid male academic, artist or scientist – in this most sterile shallow procreative model, she proliferates. In every screen, in every projector, ever lecture theatre hub, Virus grows new tentacles, legs, cunts, arms with balls on the end like the viruses that used to be in science class when there were still classes and when they still insisted on believing in science, and objectivity - that is men’s ability to make objects of the world.

Situated at a major conference, the performance, or live casting, of ‘A Spell to Bind All Male Conference Panels’ enacts an embodied, magical form of knowledge production and protection from masculine futurity. In particular the performance presentation critiques and acts against the proliferation of all-male groups of academics and scientists proffering, and producing ‘the future’ in terms of technology, embodiment, and affect.

The spell casting features elements of technopaganism – remote controlled candles, electronic music, powerpoint; more traditional magical elements – a salt circle, moss, thread; karaoke; and anger, to power a spell to stop the speech of all-mall conference panels.

The spell will be shifted according to conference panels, assertions, and feelings at 4S, and will feed on and react to primary research at the 4S meeting speaking with women, non-binary and queer scholars present about their experiences of masculine authority in social and other studies of science, particularly futurisms.

Author

• Linda Stupart, University of Reading