– CFP: Computation and the Non-Human Panel at CAA 2013
This is an open call for papers to present at the annual College Art Association conference in New York in 2013, at a 1.5 hour open-session panel sponsored by the New Media Caucus. PANEL TITLE Computation and the Non-Human – New Directions in Queer Theory and Art PANEL CHAIR Micha Cárdenas, PhD Student, Media Arts...
This is an open call for papers to present at the annual College Art Association conference in New York in 2013, at a 1.5 hour open-session panel sponsored by the New Media Caucus.
PANEL TITLE
Computation and the Non-Human – New Directions in Queer Theory and Art
PANEL CHAIR
Micha Cárdenas, PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California
PROPOSAL DEADLINE
Proposals due to session chair October 20th, 2012
HOW TO SUBMIT
Prepare a 500 word abstract of your paper in Doc, PDF or RTF format. Please send all abstracts via email to Micha Cárdenas at mmcarden@usc.edu
ABOUT THE PANEL
Michael Warner’s recent article _Queer and Then?_ in The Chronicle of Higher Education considers the end of queer theory alongside the termination of Duke University’s Series Q. While the article assumes a direct link between the end of queer theory and the body of work published in the series, the journal simultaneously gestured to another future for queer theory. The same day that Warner’s piece was published a review entitled _Queer 2.0_ applauded Jack Halberstam’s 2011 The Queer Art of Failure for representing _a second generation of queer theory_ and its use of low theory and unusual archives. In the earliest academic writing on queer theory, Teresa de Lauretis described the field as a discursive horizon and Annamarie Jagose described it as an _a non-identity–or even anti-identity—politics_. Yet, in their essays, there was still little consideration of the transgender, the transnational or the transistor.
The moniker of Queer 2.0 is useful not only because we are invested in alternative methodologies that, like Halberstam, move beyond high theory, but also because the phrase highlights and emphasizes the technological and its inseparability from queerness. Today, to think queerness requires that the human and nonhuman be thought together, and that the human be de-centered as the primary locus of/for queerness. Queerness must be engaged in all its distributed materialities, human and beyond. This queerness constructs an alternative genealogy that extends to cyberfeminism, media theory, hacktivism, computer science, animal studies, and neuroscience. This turn also extends beyond Western narratives of technological progress, success, and development, and looks to a resistive repurposing of the failed objects and techniques that circulate in a global context. New horizons for queer theory extend beyond its original United States centric framing, emerging out of transnational considerations and experiences of queer immigrants, including second generation immigrants.
Importantly, new directions in queer theory and art invest in forms of politics beyond the linguistic performativity of queer theory’s origins. We incorporate matter, technology, and the nonhuman into our politics, generating a political schema that stresses illegibility, failure and the strangest of pleasures.
Possible areas or subject matter could be:
– Queer New Media
– Queer Theories of Computation
– Queer Femme/Butch in New Media
– Intersections of Biometrics with Queer Theory
– Transgender Wearable Electronics
– Queer Approaches to Cyberfeminism and Hacktivism
– Non-Human Sexualities
– Neuroscience and Gender/Sexuality
– Queer and Trans People of Color in New Media
– Technology and Feminist Materiality
QUESTIONS
If you have any questions of queries please feel free to contact panel chair, Micha Cárdenas PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California, mmcarden@usc.edu
PAPER PROPOSAL DEADLINE
October 20th 2012.