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Session Submission Summary

Feminist Engagements with the Im-materialites of Gender and the West

Wed, September 4, 8:00 to 9:30am, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, Floor: Four, Bayside C

Abstract

As Donna Haraway states in her Primatology article, “[g]ender and the West are eminently political constitutions because they order the differences central to the possibility of a collectively recognized and enforced reality. The rule of order in these hard myths is the dialectical rule of act and potency, mind and body” (Haraway 1984: 492).

However, feminist engagements with the material-semiotic have stated that these hard myths not only imbricate matter and meaning through discursive-and-material practices but also go beyond both mind and body, matter and language (Wilson 2015, Grosz 2017). The political potentials of these im-material residues have still to be grasped more deeply (Asdal 2015) and following this strand of thought crucial questions about their functionings arise.

Papers that draw on the feminist political agenda of blurring the distinction between the material and the ideal are of special interest in this panel. It aims to discuss approaches that highlight the political potentials of West- and gender-related im-material relations as well as engagements with mind-and-body, sociality-and-materiality, imaginations-and-materializations as a whole.

Accounts on im-material relations of gender and the West that are taken as a kind of infrastructure enabling or prohibiting operations of the social are as welcome as sociotechnical imaginaries that create emancipatory futures. Papers on social and cultural roles of technology that extemporise im-material residues working across the material-semiotic and uttering themselves across discursivity and materiality are highly welcome.

Individual Presentations

Session Organizer