The moment of casting is a crucial one in any media production. Casting the ‘right’ person shapes the narrative as much as the way in which the final product might be received by critics and audiences. For this article, casting—as the moment in which gender is hypervisible in its complex intersectional entanglement with class, race and sexuality—will be our gateway to exploring the dynamics of discussion of gender conventions and how we, as feminist scholars, might manoeuvre. To do so, we will test and triangulate three different forms of ethnographically inspired inquiry: 1) ‘collaborative autoethnography,’ to discuss male-to-female gender-bending comedies from the 1980s and 1990s, 2) ‘netnography’ of online discussions about the (potential) recasting of gendered legacy roles from Doctor Who to Mary Poppins, and 3) textual media analysis of content focusing on the casting of cisgender actors for transgender roles. Exploring the affordances and challenges of these three methods underlines the duty of care that is essential to feminist audience research. Moving across personal and anonymous, ‘real’ and ‘virtual,’ popular and professional discussion highlights how gender has been used and continues to be instrumentalised in lived audience experience and in audience research.
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Amateur Cities and Institute of Network Cultures are proud to present Feminist Finance Syllabus, a supplement to the Feminist Finance Zine titled Radical Care: Embracing Feminist Finance. It is a result of the Twitter conversations that took place during three launch events of the zine between April and May 2020.This syllabus is a starting point for diving into the field of feminist finance. It features scholarly concepts, grassroots projects, artistic thought-experiments, fictional responses, and questions without answers. The events from which we sourced the references and quotes featured in our syllabus are just snapshots of bigger discussions and are in no way exhaustive. Our discussions were influenced by the events of early 2020, the experience of living through the COVID-19 pandemic, and its socio-economic consequences. This perspective framed already existing feminist debates in a different way, adding new urgencies to particular struggles. We saw important lines of thought emerge in the discussion, and structured them into six topics: fundamental critiques, radical care, interdependence, units of account, alternative money design, forms of organizing.We would love to keep the conversation on feminist finance alive and this syllabus is an invitation to continue it. Download your digital copy of the Feminist Finance Syllabus here and follow the links in the syllabus to participate.
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This article discusses the viability of a feminist constructivist approach of knowledge through the careful reading of the work of the feminist scholar and historian of science and technology, Donna Haraway. Haraway proposes an interpretation of objectivity in terms of "situated knowledges". Both the subject and the object of knowledge are endowed with the status of material-semiotic actors. By blurring the epistemological boundary between subject and object, Haraway's narratives about scientific discourse become populated with hybrid subjects/objects. The author argues that the ethics of these hybrid subjects consists of an uneasy mixture of a Nietzschean and a socialist-Christian ethic. The article concludes by setting out why Haraway's project constitutes an interesting effort to fuse postmodern insights and feminist commitments.
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Amateur Cities and the Institute of Network Cultures are proud to present a feminist finance zine titled ‘Radical Care: Embracing Feminist Finance’. It is a cooperative future-thinking effort from the MoneyLab network, a collective of artists, designers, researchers, geeks and activists dedicated to the task of experimenting with more equitable, diverse, and sustainable futures for finance and economy.The zine is a diverse collection of voices organized in three types of contributions: quickfire interviews (short reactions to big questions), double interviews (conversational long reads), and artworks (projects addressing discussed subjects visually).Today we live in a world that is dominated by an economic system that is global, competitive, and centred around a rational and egoistic vision of the human (homo economicus). In this publication we asked ourselves and over twenty contributors how we can embrace different values focusing on locality, cooperation, and caring. Can an affective and compassionate vision of the human get us closer to homo reciprocans or cooperans? How can we break out of the crisis of imagination, and as Lana Swartz and Martin Zeilinger propose, move towards the crisis of implementation? How we can navigate the relations of exchange and trust between humans and machines, but also, our relationship with the environment. Can we finally not only recognize the climate catastrophe, but also find ways to act against it, through an economic lens, mindful of not reproducing patriarchal and colonial histories? As Denise Thwaites notes, this work starts with careful and respectful listening to voices that have long been silenced. In the words of Ruth Catlow and Reijer Hendrikse: history is not over, we are just beginning!We hope this zine will inspire you and those around you to think about alternative ways in which we could organize our economies. We highly encourage you to share it and let it reach new places. For that reason we attached a travel record card as a cover. Please keep it in motion and get in touch!
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Through artistic interventions into the computational backbone of maternity services, the artists behind the Body Recovery Unit explore data production and its usages in healthcare governance. Taking their artwork The National Catalogue Of Savings Opportunities. Maternity, Volume 1: London (2017) as a case study, they explore how artists working with ‘live’ computational culture might draw from critical theory, Science and Technology Studies as well as feminist strategies within arts-led enquiry. This paper examines the mechanisms through which maternal bodies are rendered visible or invisible to managerial scrutiny, by exploring the interlocking elements of commissioning structures, nationwide information standards and databases in tandem with everyday maternity healthcare practices on the wards in the UK. The work provides a new context to understand how re-prioritisation of ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ births, breastfeeding, skin-to-skin contact, age of conception and other factors are gaining momentum in sync with cost-reduction initiatives, funding cuts and privatisation of healthcare services.
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This is the third episode of Art in Permacrisis, a podcast on the organization of art workers in the face of the ever-growing stack of crises. How can artists make a living without selling their souls? Can we imagine and practice a sustainable art economy beyond precarity? How should we transform the circulation of artworks, the curriculum of art and design academies, the exhibition programs of museums, and the organization of collectives and unions? We invite speakers with combined backgrounds in art, theory, and organizing to share their insights.In this episode, we talk to Katja Praznik. Katja is an associate professor at the University at Buffalo’s Arts Management Program and the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies. Our conversation focuses on her book, Art Work: Invisible Labour and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism as well as questions of strategy and the future of work in the arts.
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Since 2013, MoneyLab has explored questions around the design of money, the democratization of finance, and the new shifts in fintech. On 14 and 15 November, the 7th edition of MoneyLab was held in Amsterdam. At MoneyLab #7: Outside of Finance, we looked beyond the world of libertarian startups with their often masculine preoccupations. From hyperlocal cryptocurrencies at techno festivals to self-organized exchange systems in refugee communities, what are promising design strategies to counter the corporatization of money? Can we imagine a crypto economy that values care work and focuses on equity and solidarity?
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This book analyses the values and processes that characterise DIY (do it yourself) digital infrastructure, relating networked initiatives to broader tensions in contemporary alternative media production, namely between ideology and practice in cultural and artistic networked initiatives. Adopting immersive and direct engagement methods, focusing specifcially on the case of A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers, this book shows that contemporary alternative media projects are defined mainly by the people and the networks they build — alternative infrastructures are about the process driving them, more so than the content produced. Small or local organisations intervene in infrastructures by building responses to extractivist platform models, but can be exclusive to the communities already involved in the process. Nevertheless, alternative media initiatives are culturally and socially significant, as they produce critical media discourses and network imaginaries that signify a call for better digital and technical literacy in society.
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