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From the perspective of the locus of enunciation, understanding the past cannot be detached from speaking the present, just as the disciplinary (or epistemological) subject cannot be detached from the nondisciplinary (or hermeneutical) one.
--Walter Mignolo, from The Darker Side of the Renaissance (University of Michigan Press, 1995)
Moving forward from Mignolo’s assertion of the necessary simultaneity of ‘understanding the past’ in order to ‘speak the present,’ conceptually intertwined in his deployment of the Foucauldian concept of the ‘locus of enunciation,’ this network seeks both to research and uncover certain links between the development and deployment of Western rationalist scientific and technological ‘advances’ (both in colonial contexts as well as in the space of European metropoles) and the construction of a differential, hierarchical (re)ordering of the field of the ‘human.’ We understand this (re)ordering as both thoroughly implicated in colonial and (neo)colonial violences (physical as well as epistemological) and intimately tied to the development of gendered, sexed and sexual ‘pathologies’ and ‘aberrances.’ It is our contention that to think deeply the possibilities for coalitional resistance to contemporary identitarian political models predicated on notions of assimilation and normativity (in contradistinction to more radical, coalitional political projects cognizant of what Audre Lorde has pointedly termed ‘non-dominant differences’), it is necessary to sort through, unpack, and rethink the epistemological and ontological legacies (scars, wounds) of these scientific taxonomies of the ‘human,’ with an emphasis on the attendant political foreclosures effected by not only their histories, but their ongoing, continual maintenance.
We seek contact with researchers, activists, and artists (with or without academic affiliation) to enter into an ongoing conversation with us, punctuated by workshops, seminars, peer reviews of network affiliates work and research, etc. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: the historicization of pre-colonial senses of corporeality, ontology, and relationality, as well as their subsequent transmutation; the medicalization of gender and sex (particularly regarding statist and scientifico-medical interventions in intersex, transsex, transgender, and queer lives, historically and contemporaneously); critiques of and questions pertaining to the ‘cyborg’ and the ‘post-human’; relations between science, corporeality and visuality; scientific racism/scientific racialism; sexual pathologization and the modern State; biopolitical processes; and instantiations of resistance and insubordination which either actively or implicitly counter hegemonic understandings of the ‘human.’
Coordinator: Hilary Malatino
hilary.malatino@gmail.com