Diffractive Readings: NewMaterialism_Cyberfeminism_Computing

• In Event: Feminist Technoscience by Other Means: Reconfiguring Research Practices for World-Making Beyond the Academy - I

Abstract

Feminist scholars Karen Barad and Donna Haraway speak of diffraction and “diffractive reading” as a way to situate and overlay different (and sometimes disparate) theories, materials and activities, so as to see what kind of new unseen territories of co-working/world-making might congeal. Following this tradition, this paper explores what kind of new “agential cuts” can be enacted when cyberfeminist legacies, feminist new materialist theories, computing theory/practices and artistic research are brought together into a series of bumpy knotted conversations and read through each other. We start from the cyberfeminist ethos of engaging with technology hands-on and ask what happens when something becomes an object of computing and therefore needs to be formalized, standardized and translated into binary logic. This question, which was often missing in early techno-utopian discourses as well as cyberfeminist fantasies, points to a process that is itself already material-semiotic and based on processing electrical signals and manipulating signs.

Furthermore, we look into different methodological approaches that underpin the way various subject matters are approached in these domains and how innovative methodologies can be generated. We interrogate to what extent can worlds be made and un-made without resorting to techno-solutionist escapism or techno-phobic atavism, and whose worlds might they be. Reflecting on our own interdisciplinary experiment of network-building with people involved in these different practices, we will propose some ideas for what kind of feminist STS we strive for methodologically and theoretically, and what political potential opens up through diffraction and focus on mattering in the digital age.

Authors

• Goda Klumbyte, University of Kassel

• Loren Britton, University of Kassel

• Claude Draude, University of Kassel, Germany