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.
DOCUMENT
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.
DOCUMENT
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!
MULTIFILE
Society continues to place an exaggerated emphasis on women's skins, judging the value of lives lived within, by the colour and condition of these surfaces. This artistic research will explore how the skin of a painting might unpack this site of judgement, highlight its objectification, and offer women alternative visualizations of their own sense of embodiment. This speculative renovation of traditional concepts of portrayal will explore how painting, as an aesthetic body whose material skin is both its surface and its inner content (its representations) can help us imagine our portrayal in a different way, focusing, not on what we look like to others, but on how we sense, touch, and experience. How might we visualise skin from its ghostly inner side? This feminist enquiry will unfold alongside archival research on The Ten Largest (1906-07), a painting series by Swedish Modernist Hilma af Klint. Initial findings suggest the artist was mapping traditional clothing designs into a spectral, painterly idea of a body in time. Fundamental methods research, and access to newly available Af Klint archives, will expand upon these roots in maps and women’s craft practices and explore them as political acts, linked to Swedish Life Reform, and knowingly sidestepping a non-inclusive art history. Blending archival study with a contemporary practice informed by eco-feminism is an approach to artistic research that re-vivifies an historical paradigm that seems remote today, but which may offer a new understanding of the past that allows us to also re-think our present. This mutuality, and Af Klint’s rhizomatic approach to image-making, will therefore also inform the pedagogical development of a Methods Research programme, as part of this post-doc. This will extend across MA and PhD study, and be further enriched by pedagogy research at Cal-Arts, Los Angeles, and Konstfack, Stockholm.
