Moderator: Kailin Wright
Location: Zoom Room B
Shifting Shores: Learning from the Teachings of the Pandemic and the Climate Crisis
The teachings of the pandemic and the climate crisis challenge us to develop alternatives to extractive research methodologies that legitimize colonial and neoliberal knowledge systems privileged in the academy and fueled by the desire to know, name, own, and control. This will to power manifests even in new materialist and posthumanist theories that espouse non-anthropocentric conceptions of agency while continuing to reproduce enduring racist representations of Indigenous peoples.
For example, in their 2022 manifesto Mémo sur la nouvelle classes écologique [Memo on the New Ecological Class], Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz relate the experience of the pandemic in Western societies to a troublesome inability to respond constructively to the environmental
crisis and who asserts: “We are as helpless as the ancient ‘savages’ overwhelmed by the modernization that devastated their world. From now on, we are the maladjusted and underdeveloped ‘savages’ incapable of reacting to the shock of this ‘demodernization’!” (Mémo 52; my trans.). While calling for the emergence of a new ecological consciousness fueled by transnational coalitions inclusive of the North American Indigenous communities who resist hydraulic fracturing practices (11), Latour and Schultz make only a single mention of Indigenous knowledge in this 95-page volume: “When seeking to dishabituate ourselves from solely focusing on relations of production, it is also in our interest to rekindle new connections with so-called Indigenous peoples ̶ one quarter of a billion inhabitants, no less! ̶ who […] point to wholly contemporary usages of the practices of engendering that will need to be invented. This is a bitter lesson, when the ancient ‘savages’ must teach the new ones how to resist modernization!” (57-58; my trans.).
Postcolonial studies scholar Alison Ravenscroft provides a counter-narrative to this “bitter lesson” when referring to Indigenous anthropologist Zoe Todd (Métis/otipemisiw), who recounts her experience of a talk by Latour in which he failed to acknowledge contributions made by Indigenous scholars. Ravenscroft argues that such a refusal of indebtedness enacts “colonialism’s elision of Indigenous intellectual labors” that surreptitiously re-instates “the Western subject assuming […] the sovereign’s mantle even in those new materialist writings that sustain some of the most profound critiques of this very centrism” (356–57). In response to the ongoing racism,
white supremacy, and Eurocentric colonial thinking that continue to be reproduced within the academy, the US-based collective Red Nation ingeniously reclaims the word “savage” for the purpose of decolonial activism: “In the grammar of capitalism, the savage is the antonym of the
obedient worker. In the grammar of nationalism, the savage is the opposite of the dutiful citizen or settler. […T]he continued usage of the word demonstrates the abject failure of settler colonialism’s primary goal ̶ the elimination of the Native” (28).
How can performance research and pedagogy acknowledge the interrelation of colonial history, environmental degradation, and the unsustainable neoliberal model of global capitalism, honour and engage with the work of Indigenous scholars and activists, and offer decolonial, non-anthropocentric, and eco-critical alternatives?
Virginie Magnat, University of British Columbia
“Stranded Between the Shores of Gender: Performing Nonbinary Identities Beyond Resignification”
In the final chapter of their canonical text, Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler explains that performative acts obtain power through citationality (171) and that, through processes of “discursive resignification,” (175) performativity holds queering capacities. This queering of gender citations can be useful in the conscious identity expression of those whose genders fall along the spectrum of “woman” to “man.” But where does the citationality of gender
performance leave those who understand their genders not as falling somewhere along this spectrum but as existing completely outside of its bounds? Although nonbinary identities are considered by some as exemplary of gender performativity – leaving nonbinary individuals
vulnerable to the ruthless scrutiny of which of their choices reference “man” versus which reference “woman” – some humans who claim these genders become stranded, searching for sources to cite like lifeboats that will express their nuanced gender identities and be recognized across social groups. Through the examination of my 2019 performance “Shave Me SamiTM,” as well as works from other nonbinary drag and performance artists, including Sin Wai Kin, I will investigate how contemporary, nonbinary artists are using citationality to express their genders. My paper will ask: What sources are being cited in the performance of the nonbinary?
What are the limits of citationality and resignification in expressing nonbinary genders? And what practices beyond citationality are being used to articulate nonbinary identities? Through this analysis, I will explore whether gender performativity can effectively encompass identities
that do not align with the binary concept of the gender spectrum.
Sami Wymes – University of Oxford
Sami Wymes is stardust, dreaming and building performance beyond binaries. Sami has received institutional accreditations: a BAH in drama from queen’s university; a MA in performance from york university; and soon a MSt in gender from the university of Oxford, where their dissertation will propose a phenomenology of nonbinary performance.