This is a call for participation for a workshop with Prof. Claire Colebrook (Penn State University) entitled “How (not) to think in/corporeal feminisms and environmental post/humanisms”. The half-day workshop takes place on Friday, 22 November 2019 at Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main. Participants are asked to submit a statement of interest and in case of active participation an abstract of their research project until 30 September 2019.
What are we talking about when we talk about matter, sexual difference, the body and in/corporeality in feminist theory? What role does environmentalism play for posthumanisms and the environment for the post/human? In what ways do and don’t posthumanisms and new materialisms tie in with trajectories of feminist theory? We seek to explore these and further related questionsthrough engaging with the work of Claire Colebrook. Colebrook makes an instructive contribution to feminist (new) materialisms by developing a genealogy that does not build on a critique of representationalist accounts of materiality. Instead, she discussesthe early writings of Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz and Luce Irigaray. Colebrook highlights that it is already in their theories of ‘sexual difference’that they theorize matter and representation non-dualistically. While affirming the new materialist critique of phenomenology and poststructuralism, for Colebrook, the main issue with the de-corporealization of the body and matter is not a textualist, linguistic, postmodern and constructivist tradition of feminism. She rather develops a concept of matter as a positive, in/corporealevent that is neither ‘the other’ of representation,nor a negated origin.
The full call can be found here.