PERFORMING MEDIA

A seminar at Goldsmiths, University of London, organised by The Creative 
Media Forum in collaboration with the MA in Gender and Culture

Date: Thursday 15 October 2009, 4.30-6.30
Venue: Richard Hoggart Building (main building), Room 142, Goldsmiths, 
New Cross, SE14 6NW London

How to get to Goldsmiths:
http://www.gold.ac.uk/find-us/

This event is free and open to all.

Programme:

GUEST SPEAKER: ANNETTE SCHLICHTER, University of California Irvine
‘Sounds of Gender? Voices, Bodies and Gender Performativity’

The metaphor of ‘voice’ has been crucial in critiques of dominant 
regimes of the construction and representation of gendered subjects and 
in the struggle for self-representation of the marginalized. However, 
the role of the material voice in (de and re-) constructions of genders 
and sexualities has not been soundly interrogated since feminist and 
queer debates often focused on the corporeal as visual. On the other 
hand, recent work in African-American Studies rethinks the role of sound 
in cultural critique but tends to neglect its gendered dimensions. 
Drawing from various realms of critical theories of the body and of 
subjectivity, my paper will discuss the dimension of the sonic, in 
particular the role of the material voice and the possibilities of its 
technological reproduction, in Butler's influential theory of gender 
performativity.

SARAH KEMBER AND JOANNA ZYLINSKA, Goldsmiths
‘Creative Media between Invention and Critique, or What’s Still at Stake 
in Performativity’

The creative media project we propose arises out of an attempt on our 
part to work through and reconcile, in a manner that would be 
‘satisfactory’ on both an intellectual and artistic level, academic 
writing and creative practice. This effort has to do with more than just 
the usual anxieties associated with attempts to breach the 
‘theory-practice’ divide and negotiate the associated issues of rigour, 
skill, technical competence and aesthetic judgement. Working in and with 
creative media is for us first and foremost an epistemological question 
of how we can perform knowledge differently through a set of practices 
that also ‘produce things’. Through instantiating this project, we are 
also making a claim for the status of theory as theatre, or for the 
performativity of all theory - in media, arts and sciences; in written 
and spoken forms. We are also highlighting the ongoing possibilities of 
remediation across all media and all forms of communication.

SPEAKERS' BIOS

Sarah Kember is a Reader in New Technologies of Communication at 
Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of two monographs, 
Virtual Anxieties: Photography, New Technologies and Subjectivity 
(Routledge, 1998) and Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life (Routledge, 
2003), and co-editor of Inventive Life: Towards a New Vitalism (Sage, 
2006). Her articles on feminist science and technology studies, debates 
between artificial life and other aspects of the convergence between 
biology and computer science, and photography and imaging technologies 
have been published in numerous journals and books. Kember is currently 
developing an innovative approach to the question of remediation and the 
‘fusion’ of science and fiction. She is the author of the forthcoming 
novel entitled The Optical Effects of Lightning.

Annette Schlichter is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at 
the University of California Irvine. Her research and teaching interests 
are feminist and queer theories, contemporary American Literature, 
theories of performance and performativity, and histories and theories 
of voice. She is the author of a German-speaking study on the figure of 
the madwoman in feminist critiques of representation and the coeditor of 
a German collection on feminism and postmodernism. She is currently 
completing a book manuscript titled Troubling Straightness, which 
focuses on constructions and critiques of "heterosexuality" in queer and 
feminist theoretical and literary writings. Parts of that project have 
been published in GLQ („Queer at last“: Straight Intellectuals and the 
Desire for Transgression“, 2004) The Journal of Lesbian Studies 
("Contesting Straights: Lesbians, Queer Heterosexuals and the Critique 
of Heteronormativity," 2007) and Postmodern Culture ("I Can't Get Sexual 
Genders Straight: Kathy Acker's Writing of Bodies and Pleasures", 2007). 
Schlichter has also begun work on another book project which examines 
the material voice in, or rather its absence from, recent feminist 
theories of embodied subjectivity.

Joanna Zylinska is a Reader in New Media and Communications at 
Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of three books: 
Bioethics in the Age of New Media (MIT Press, 2009), The Ethics of 
Cultural Studies (Continuum, 2005) and On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being 
Scared: the Feminine and the Sublime (Manchester University Press, 
2001). She is also the editor of The Cyborg Experiments: the Extensions 
of the Body in the Media Age (Continuum, 2002) and co-editor of 
Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the 
Holocaust (University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Zylinska combines her 
philosophical writings with photographic art practice. Her exhibition, 
‘We Have Always Been Digital’, was shown at the Shifted gallery in 
Melbourne in August 2009.

-- 
Dr Joanna Zylinska
Department of Media and Communications
Goldsmiths, University of London

My website: http://www.joannazylinska.net
Co-editor of Culture Machine: http://www.culturemachine.net

* New book: Bioethics in the Age of New Media *
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11759