Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

5S
Performing mobilities – Exteriorities, storyscapes, temporalities, and the movements of faith (Chair, TBA)
Stuart Grant
Being-moved-by/Giving-over-to/Performing-from
This paper details a performance method which aims to prepare the performer to be sensitised to being
performed by exteriorities – environments, relations, objects, atmospheres, others. The methodology is
based in Bodyweather and Butoh techniques, informed by and understood through Heidegger’s idea of “the
Turning” and Levinas’ “passivity more passive than the most passive passivity”. The ultimate aim is
preparation for the abdication of agency over to the cause of finding ways of inhabiting the earth which are
determined by the belonging-to, immersion-in and emergence-of the body from that earth. The
presentation includes an invitation for audience members to participate in demonstrations of concrete
techniques which achieve a radical reorientation of the body in its relation to exteriorities.
Misha Myers
Storyscaping transnational places through complex media environments
This presentation explores how forms of spatial storytelling mediated by networked and/or portable
technologies may create new engagements with places marked by transnational mobility and displacement.
Works such as National Theatre Wales’ Border Game, Stalker’s Primavera Roma, Visser, Rothuizen and van
Tol’s Refugee Republic, or the author’s way from home, use multiple media platforms to both map and
facilitate orientations to and representations of place by transporting audiences, physically and/or
imaginatively, between disparate and hybrid digital and physical experiences. This presentation will consider
how contradictory claims, desires and memories co-exist and are negotiated in these creative interstitial
spaces.
Stacy Holman Jones
Waiting for queer: Performing temporalities in/through the not-yet-queer family
This paper takes up the notion of the delayed performative of queer mothering through the lens of
adoption. With a particular focus on the enactment of queer futurity in/through performances of waiting –
the anxious waiting for “the call” bearing news of a child that adoptive mothers do, and the insistent waiting
for the possibility of another world that mothering promises, this paper performs queer mothering as a
“doing for and toward the future” (Munoz, 2009, p. 1). The paper draws on Halberstam’s (2005) concepts of
“family time” – the heteronormative reproduction of “family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” – and
“queer time” (p. 6) – non-normative modes of embodiment and relationality that emerge once we leave
these temporal frames behind. Queer family time and queer futurity rely on waiting as the “relational and
collective modality of endurance and support” (Munoz p. 91). Like adoption, the delayed performative of the
not-yet queer family is an anticipatory and delayed enactment of intimate relationships as a braiding
together hope and affect (Munoz p. 46).
5T
In the Interstices: Intimacy, Memory, Archive (Chair, Mary O’Connor)
Nadia Rhook
When a Migrant Locks His Lips: Hearing the Intelligibility of Syrian Lives in Colonial Melbourne
Late 19th century Melbourne was a polyglot city, ruled by anglophones. Here, as in sites across the globe,
linguistic difference shaped whether a migrant’s life could be rendered intelligible to the colonial state. The
1896 manslaughter trial of one Abraham Khaled gives a window into the intimacies of the trade and
romantic lives of Syrian merchants and hawkers who took up residence in the city’s so-called ‘slum’ district.
In the interstices of Melbourne’s street grid, this paper explores, racialized subjects forged spaces of political
and linguistic autonomy. By taking a city’s linguistic margins as the center, how might we recover fragments
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