[-empyre-] queer is everywhere

[Alex Juhasz]

On Micha's request, I'd like to introduce you all to a project I am currently working on with Anne Balsamo, who was last month's discussion organizer here.
It's called FemTechNet and the connections and points of contention with this conversation seem critical.

First a little intro to our project and an invitation, then some discussion:

I am part of a global effort--FemTechNet--to archive and teach the history of feminism and technology and invite members of this list to join us in our collective efforts in building the world's first MDCLE.
“Dialogues in Feminism and Technology” is a Massively Distributed Collaborative Learning Experiment: a feminist rethinking of a MOOC. For our feminist endeavor, teaching and learning are adaptive, dispersed, and shared.
As technology remakes academia and the arts, we see that critical analysis of gender, sexualities, and race have been absent in much of this re-thinking of disciplines and practices.  Feminist scholarship that made great strides in the pre-Internet era may be lost in the digital era. Feminist who work in a variety of disciplinary and institutional homes may not share histories or current work.
Course Description
Produced collectively by FemTechNet—a network of hundreds of international feminist scholars in a variety of fields and disciplines—“Dialogues in Feminism and Technology” delivers (and grows) ten weeks of course content covering both the histories and cutting edge scholarship on technology produced through art, science and visual studies. Recorded conversations between luminaries in these fields will anchor each of ten weeks of themed content, but from there, each professor will tailor a course best-suited to her students, institution, locale, and discipline from a diverse, robust, and growing database of “Objects that Learn”—readings, media, web-resources, and conversations that are submitted and peer-reviewed for teaching by the network. Shared assignments will link learners across disciplines, institutions and national boundaries as their own efforts become part of the feminist database and dialogue.
You can join the network by joining our listserv which sits on the fembotcollective.org<http://fembotcollective.org/> site under the pull-down "Register"
Thanks and I hope to be collaborating with many of you soon.

Alex Juhasz
Media Studies
Pitzer College

One of the areas of some contention regarding the FemTechNet effort, that will not surprise anyone here I think, is how expansive and/or endangering might be the term "feminism" to include all the people and practices we see integral to this project. I would be interested to hear people on this Queer New Media discussion talk about the role of feminism for their work.

Speaking personally here about my lived and adaptive intellectual, artistic and political history in media making, activism and criticism, it was my feminism, laced onto AIDS activism via lesbian and gay love and politics that initiated and still anchors (my) queerness. My "old media work"--AIDS activist videos, feature documentaries, feature fake documentaries that are actually narrative films--are usually "queer" in that they are often lesbian work and/or AIDS work, and because I am queer. But my work is and was first and foremost feminist. When I recently produced the micro-budget lesbian or perhaps queer feature, "The Owls<http://www.theowlsmovie.com/>" (Cheryl Dunye 2010), working with a collective of primarily queer people of color in LA, the role of both gender and feminism were highly debated within our collective in relation, it felt, to individual's lived experiences of their "post" identity (politics): particularly in relation to the words and experiences umbrellaed under ther terms "woman" or "lesbian" and then by default, their handmaiden: "feminism."

When I posted Shu Lea's video, "les cles e<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk7TOUiQ7-Q>" yesterday, I gestured to the beautiful and provocative ways that this gem is about no queer or sexual issues, or people, whatsoever: how it falls or flies (like an angel) outside of identity (politics), into form and fantasy and even philosophy. However, because we hear Shu Lea, this moementary flight from radical sex and technology is anchored to, and laced across my awareness of her body of work, and her body, and so to her ongoing radical feminism and queerness. I think, as culture changes, and words are de, re and unfanged, the term "feminism" to me currently points to radical political commitments to world-and self-changing in a way that "queer" has often been a bit flattened or softened by corporate culture. However, as I think through this post, it is both the quiet and loud that I seem to be most drawn to; any (queer) media that refutes an identity, or its practices or sociality, that can be bought and sold and known with a click.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20120607/bfd4632a/attachment.htm>