Feminist Aesthetics and the Posthuman
Speakers): Chloe Rutter-Jensen and Patricia Valderrama
We are looking forward to continuing discussions on power and the non-human at our first event of next quarter. Please save the date on April 16th at
5:45 PM, when we will be joined by Professor Chloe Rutter-Jensen and Patricia Valderrama who shared the following descriptions of their talks:
Chloe Rutter-Jensen, Universidad de los Andes
Human Elements of the “Periodic Table”: Delcy Morelos and Posthumanism
Current “cultural” products in the contact zone we call Colombia are a stimulating place to challenge the human as center of the universe. Morelos’s work, her co-creations, or better yet reconfigurations, consistently undertake becoming and undoing. In particular, she undoes the fiction of the self-generative subject, that subject which can invent HIMself no matter what its conditions. My talk explores how Morelos’ posthumanist creations help us understand how “we are all in this together”.
Patricia Valderrama, Stanford University
We’re Going Extinct! Animal Arts for the Anthropocene
All species, including our own, are confronting a qualitatively different existential crisis in the form of anthropogenic climate change, which includes the possibility of human extinction within the next eighty years. In this talk, I will consider what literature can do, beyond mimetic representation, to help us face the multispecies challenges the next decades and centuries will surely bring. Putting Nietzsche’s aesthetics in conversation with materialist, environmental, and decolonial feminisms, I try to use a certain kind of literature to chart a way forward and through, but not out of, the grief and dread of the sixth mass extinction.
In preparation for the discussion, please read the following pieces attached to this message: Christine Helliwell’s, “ “It’s only a penis”: Rape, Feminism, and Difference”, Camila Esguerra Muelle’s and Alejandra Quintana Martínez’ “ “Tu vida también es mi país”: sexualidades disonantes y fugas de género en Liliana Felipe y Jesusa Rodríguez” (in Spanish), Dorion Sagan’s “Beautiful monsters”, Mary Louise Pratt’s “Concept and Chronotope” and selections from Nietzsche’s “The birth of tragedy”. Please feel free to contact me or Daniel Hernández (dhernand [at] stanford.edu) with any questions.
We will meet in Pigott Hall (bldg 260) in room 216. Dinner will be served at 5:45 PM; the meeting will begin at 6:00 PM. Discussion will be in English.