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

3S
Lyons)
Messing with the Cultured Subject: Genealogies of Futures, the Before, and the After (Chair, Siobhan
This transdisciplinary panel proposes a range of methodological approaches to the materially situated temporality of
gender as a cultured subject. The categories of gender, subjectivity, identity, and sexuality are problematised by such
notions as affect, agency, performance, entanglement, decolonisation, and spacetimematterings (Haraway 1988;
1991; Butler 1990; 1993; Braidotti 2002; Barad 2003; Mohanty 2003; Angerer 2007; Visweswaran 2010). These
notions have both exposed the agnostic nature of power fields (Haraway 2008), and given us licence to “grapple with
the messiness of the world” (Stengers 2011).
Kate O’Halloran Anti-sociality and Queer Enough Futures
This paper explores scholarship on queer temporality. Texts on queer temporality post the anti-social turn in
US queer theory are pitched as a challenge to so-called linear time lines, to the necessity of equality within a
neoliberal, conservative regime. Typically, this means one of two approaches: the rejection outright of the
concept of the future (Edelman 2004), or the encouragement of alternative, queer timelines, which are seen
as disrupting the hetero/homonormative or linear status quo (Halberstam 2005). Although pitched as
“opposing” scholarly trajectories, both insist on a broad-based challenge to “normativity” and preface
“better” or anti-social futures on a binary opposition to the ordinary. This binary logic thus invests queerness
in pre-determined objects, locations, and timelines. The paper argues that this is out of step with the original
theoretical impulse of scholarship on queer temporality (see Freeman 2000; Freccero 2006), and will
propose an ethical impulse of queer theory for present and future theorising.
Erin K Stapleton The Girl that Came Before: Material Genealogies of Sexed Bodies
The contemporary popular imaginary conjures a restrictive, morphologically specific image of the female
sexed body as a visible marker of digitally produced cultures, whilst simultaneously offering a slogan-based
iteration of feminist discourse that aims to intervene into the exclusive space of that image production. The
dissonance between these two narratives produces prescriptive conditions under which the female sexed
body might operate (the perfect woman, the bad feminist). This paper will investigate the genealogical
production of the contemporary sexed body (Barad 2007; Van der Tuin 2015) to uncover potential for
resistance through enacted transgressions (Bataille 2001; Foucault 1978) of those material conditions,
referring to recent films Spy and The Heat featuring actress Melissa McCarthy. The use of the term “sexed
body” rather than “gendered body” produces the potential for sexual possibilities that operate alongside
situated material conditions under which gender is produced.
Felicity Colman The After-Life: Lovelace and Lucrezia
In critical terms feminists who look at the genealogies of how the terms of “acting,” “thinking,” and “feeling”
have been used and are used in relation to gendered discourses are engaged with critical work concerning
the constitution of subjectivity, the human, posthuman, sex, sexuality, and gendering. These debates, once
referred to as ideology, are now described as a range of different political registers (Angerer 2007; Howie
2010; Visweswaran 2010; Braidotti 2013; Fraser 2013). This paper addresses aspects of the genealogical
work of feminist thinkers engaging in the media literacy of these politics (de Lauretis 1993; Plant 1998; Van
der Tuin 2015), whose methods for approaching gendering – in terms of the modal relationships allowed to
be expressed by genders - can be useful for thinking the genealogical recoding required for material histories
(as Haraway 1988 critiques). Plant and De Lauretis’s respective research (amongst others) is a reminder of
how cultural literacies need to be developed with non-gender discrimination codes in mind.
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