Public Programs And Events

A two-day symposium hosted by CTM The Center for Transformative Media (Parsons, New School) and co-sponsored by CTM, The Graduate Center  (CUNY) and Punctum Books.  Co-organized by Patricia Clough (CUNY), Nandita Biswas Mellamphy (Western), Dan Mellamphy (Western), Svitlana Matviyenko (Western) and Ed Keller (CTM).

‘The body’ has been a central concept and site of power and subjectivity in the histories of feminism, and yet, in the age of ‘big data’ and ubiquitous computing, we are compelled to ask whether ‘corporeality’, ‘materiality’ and ‘embodiment’ have morphed into something beyond the conceptual boundaries of the ‘organic, fleshy, lived body’.

Hacking Feminism seeks to gather together scholars and practitioners who are interested in exploring how the virtualization and informationalization of bodies have impacted —  even challenged — central feminist concepts and tropes such as embodiment, materiality, corporeality, affectivity, and experientiality.  How have widespread technical developments in Cybernetics and theoretical developments in Post-Humanism pushed feminist theorizations of the body away from the dialectics of individual phenomenological subjects and objects, towards multi-sensory design interfaces, trans-individual ecologies, and technically mediated embodiments? How is the rise of ambient and affective computing changing how bodies, especially ‘data bodies,’ are being measured?  Is there a ‘messiness’ that escapes the ‘measurability’ of bodies?  Or is this escapism itself a kind of romanticism? Can we still talk about a specifically feminist approach to theorizing both phenomenological (organic) and virtual (data) bodies?

A full schedule with a list of participants can be found here.