{"title":"Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters","authors":"Erling Sandmo","doi":"10.3366/SOMA.2018.0255","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/SOMA.2018.0255","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69468235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
What does it mean to look at the monstrous? For many people, monstrous embodiment in its many forms arouses discomfort that is more or less successfully managed through the medium of our differential senses. While the creation of an interval between self and other through sight and representation allows for a reassuring self-security, there is also the sense of a certain destabilising ‘yuk’ factor present. Yet, our persistent fascination with the monstrous speaks to a profound longing that may manifest not just in curiosity about the strange, but as a form of desire. In critical cultural studies, the complications of Freudian and Lacanian desire clearly provide a platform for understanding the seductiveness of the monstrous, but are now more often surpassed by the celebration of a reconfigured and wholly positive desire in its Deleuzian sense. At the same time our longing for the monstrous denotes a desire for the grasp of knowledge and for the domestication of anomaly. As such I want to expand on the familiar uneasiness that showing images of the monstrous potentially provokes and its putative encouragement of an undoubted voyeurism, to engage instead with a Derridean exhortation to preserve the strangeness, and with an reparative reading through Deleuze that offers reasons to be hopeful.
{"title":"Visual Rhetorics and the Seductions of the Monstrous: Some Precautionary Observations","authors":"M. Shildrick","doi":"10.3366/SOMA.2018.0248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/SOMA.2018.0248","url":null,"abstract":"What does it mean to look at the monstrous? For many people, monstrous embodiment in its many forms arouses discomfort that is more or less successfully managed through the medium of our differential senses. While the creation of an interval between self and other through sight and representation allows for a reassuring self-security, there is also the sense of a certain destabilising ‘yuk’ factor present. Yet, our persistent fascination with the monstrous speaks to a profound longing that may manifest not just in curiosity about the strange, but as a form of desire. In critical cultural studies, the complications of Freudian and Lacanian desire clearly provide a platform for understanding the seductiveness of the monstrous, but are now more often surpassed by the celebration of a reconfigured and wholly positive desire in its Deleuzian sense. At the same time our longing for the monstrous denotes a desire for the grasp of knowledge and for the domestication of anomaly. As such I want to expand on the familiar uneasiness that showing images of the monstrous potentially provokes and its putative encouragement of an undoubted voyeurism, to engage instead with a Derridean exhortation to preserve the strangeness, and with an reparative reading through Deleuze that offers reasons to be hopeful.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3366/SOMA.2018.0248","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48495523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the Western cultural imaginaries the monstrous is defined – following Aristotelian categorisations – by its excess, deficiency or displacement of organic matter. These characteristics come to the fore in the field of bioart: a current in contemporary art that involves the use of biological materials (various kinds of soma: cells, tissues, organisms), and scientific procedures, technologies, protocols, and tools. Bioartistic projects and objects not only challenge the conventional ideas of embodiment and bodily boundaries, but also explore the relation between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, as well as various thresholds of the living. By looking at select bioartworks, this paper argues that the analysed projects offer a different ontology of life. More specifically, they expose life as uncontainable, that is, as a power of differentiation that traverses the divide between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, and, ultimately, life and death. In this way, they draw attention to excess, processuality and multiplicity at the very core of life itself. Thus understood, life always already surpasses preconceived material and conceptual limits. Finally, while taking Deleuzian feminisms and new materialism as its theoretical ground, the paper suggests that such a revision of the ontology of life may mobilise future conceptualisations of ethics that evade the anthropocentric logic dominant in the humanities and social sciences.
{"title":"Promises of Non/Living Monsters and Uncontainable Life","authors":"M. Radomska","doi":"10.3366/SOMA.2018.0252","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/SOMA.2018.0252","url":null,"abstract":"In the Western cultural imaginaries the monstrous is defined – following Aristotelian categorisations – by its excess, deficiency or displacement of organic matter. These characteristics come to the fore in the field of bioart: a current in contemporary art that involves the use of biological materials (various kinds of soma: cells, tissues, organisms), and scientific procedures, technologies, protocols, and tools. Bioartistic projects and objects not only challenge the conventional ideas of embodiment and bodily boundaries, but also explore the relation between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, as well as various thresholds of the living. By looking at select bioartworks, this paper argues that the analysed projects offer a different ontology of life. More specifically, they expose life as uncontainable, that is, as a power of differentiation that traverses the divide between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, and, ultimately, life and death. In this way, they draw attention to excess, processuality and multiplicity at the very core of life itself. Thus understood, life always already surpasses preconceived material and conceptual limits. Finally, while taking Deleuzian feminisms and new materialism as its theoretical ground, the paper suggests that such a revision of the ontology of life may mobilise future conceptualisations of ethics that evade the anthropocentric logic dominant in the humanities and social sciences.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3366/SOMA.2018.0252","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48584474","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Figure 20 The Jersey DevilFigure 32 The Woman-Eating Drain","authors":"E. Nielsen","doi":"10.3366/SOMA.2018.0251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/SOMA.2018.0251","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47003428","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt (eds), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene","authors":"D. McCormack","doi":"10.3366/SOMA.2018.0256","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/SOMA.2018.0256","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48377107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article considers the figure of the monster and monstrosity as a phenomenon as an entangled effect of kinship and reproduction, and thus as conveying specific understandings of gender, sexuality and race. While non-heterosexual reproduction and family-making has long been viewed as monstrous, increasing LGBTQ rights and recognition has instead insisted on its normality. Engaging with feminist and queer monster theory, and building on ethnographic research in Stockholm, Sweden, this article considers the monstrous remains within contemporary queer kinship. In particular, it proposes that when choice and intent rather than biological ‘facts’ constitute the foundation of (queer) family, sexual and racial difference does not cease to exist, but rather, re-emerges as monstrous attachments and embodiments. To sketch a larger argument about the potential limits of ideas about social construction, the article hones in on two examples. First, it shows that gestation and childbirth, as monstrous embodiments, can pose problems for families that insist on parental equality through the perceived sameness of shared intent. Secondly it proposes that in the context of Sweden, reproduction through donor-insemination is built on a cultural idea of white sperm as both neutral and desirable. These examples, the article suggest, point to some remaining irreconcilable dimensions embedded in the fantasy of queer kinship that, like monsters, haunt its queer normative forms. In closing, it argues for a reconsideration of hopeful monstrosities by considering both queer reproduction and the sexual and racial differences with which it inevitably engages can instead be understood as somatechnical, as kinship technologies that are inevitably entangled in the biopolitics of (queer) nation-making and its natrualised whiteness.
{"title":"(The promise of) Monstrous Kinship? Queer Reproduction and the Somatechnics of Sexual and Racial Difference","authors":"Ulrika Dahl","doi":"10.3366/SOMA.2018.0250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/SOMA.2018.0250","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the figure of the monster and monstrosity as a phenomenon as an entangled effect of kinship and reproduction, and thus as conveying specific understandings of gender, sexuality and race. While non-heterosexual reproduction and family-making has long been viewed as monstrous, increasing LGBTQ rights and recognition has instead insisted on its normality. Engaging with feminist and queer monster theory, and building on ethnographic research in Stockholm, Sweden, this article considers the monstrous remains within contemporary queer kinship. In particular, it proposes that when choice and intent rather than biological ‘facts’ constitute the foundation of (queer) family, sexual and racial difference does not cease to exist, but rather, re-emerges as monstrous attachments and embodiments. To sketch a larger argument about the potential limits of ideas about social construction, the article hones in on two examples. First, it shows that gestation and childbirth, as monstrous embodiments, can pose problems for families that insist on parental equality through the perceived sameness of shared intent. Secondly it proposes that in the context of Sweden, reproduction through donor-insemination is built on a cultural idea of white sperm as both neutral and desirable. These examples, the article suggest, point to some remaining irreconcilable dimensions embedded in the fantasy of queer kinship that, like monsters, haunt its queer normative forms. In closing, it argues for a reconsideration of hopeful monstrosities by considering both queer reproduction and the sexual and racial differences with which it inevitably engages can instead be understood as somatechnical, as kinship technologies that are inevitably entangled in the biopolitics of (queer) nation-making and its natrualised whiteness.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3366/SOMA.2018.0250","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49030359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This roundtable brings together scholars and artists working with the monster and the monstrous. It took place between December 2017 and June 2018 via email. Participants responded to an initial em ...
{"title":"Monster Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Mark Bould, Liv Bugge, Surekha Davies, Margrit Shildrick and Jeffrey Weinstock","authors":"D. McCormack","doi":"10.3366/SOMA.2018.0254","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/SOMA.2018.0254","url":null,"abstract":"This roundtable brings together scholars and artists working with the monster and the monstrous. It took place between December 2017 and June 2018 via email. Participants responded to an initial em ...","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49084883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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