This chapter touches upon the damaging impact of neoliberal reason on institutions of higher education, and my efforts as a teacher to help turn things around by re-vitalizing the classroom. After a critique of current neoliberal ‘borderline times’, the chapter takes the reader on a journey of diffractive re-imaginings in which I share some of my experiences of co-learning with undergraduates in an American feminist-philosophical classroom. My central argument is that the neoliberalism-induced crisis in education can be affirmatively counteracted through (...) experimentations with various posthuman and new materialist theories, and the Harawayan-Baradian methodology of diffraction in particular. Furthermore, informed by the impression that theory and pedagogical praxis go hand in hand in many contemporary feminist new materialisms, I zoom in on daily acts of resistance against the neoliberal corporatization of the American university, acts that actualized themselves as feminist new materialist pedagogies. Three examples of diffractive pedagogical strategies are then discussed in detail. (shrink)

The concept of the subject relies on humanist presuppositions. Regardless of whether purported to be decentred and posthumanist, the subject conceived in poststructuralist and philosophical terms remains anthropocentric and anthropomorphic. There is something irrecuperably Cartesian in the poststructuralist idea of the subject. Physicality, both bodily and that of the materiality of the machinic prosthesis, is barred from the constitution of the Self, as the real is barred but also foreclosed to it. The subject, therefore, is yet another philosophical phantasm, which (...) in its material actuality is determined as an instance of the signifying automaton. I argue that the “posthumanist” self, if conceived in Marxian and non-philosophical terms, ought to be viewed as the radical dyad of the signifying automaton and the real. It renders Haraway’s notion of the Cyborg more radical and unravels its inhumanity rather than posthumanity. (shrink)

“Feminicity” is the term for a predicate register that enables feminist work be accounted for as relational “active-points” that collectively can be seen through what they have achieved. But going further, it marks where those active-points contribute to the dynamic field of feminist epistemologies and where change occurs. This article contributes to my larger project’s discussion of this concept. Broadly, feminicity argues that the active-points of feminist practices need to be understood within their situated fields as materialist informatics. In the (...) digital era, examples of the affects of digital feminicity are as identified in works such as those by Wajcman ; Haraway, Hayles, VNSMatrix, Adam, Plant. Collectively, such authors and artists opened a creative, and sometimes radical discourse of the digital field as multidirectional, multidimensional, multitemporal platform of “gender actions”. Taken as a predicated field sense of the term “predicate”), this work contributes to the feminist materialist reappraisal of feminist epistemology, and larger radical feminist deconstructive projects. Thus conceived, the genealogy of digital feminicity problematizes the monopolitical terms of feminism in its collation of actions, enabling a re-situation of feminist practices as positive material interventions and expressions of the ontological constitution of the political sphere. Feminicity does not propose a chronological account of the active-points, but processually and systemically addresses the terms of generational epistemological political change. This article describes the ways in which a materialist constructed register – “feminicity”– can be used to think about encounters between the domains of gender, politics and technology, as manifested by materialist informatics. For reasons of brevity, this article focuses on just two aspects of feminicity: the terms of predication of the female as gendered, and the issue of the image, as digital informatics, comprised of activitypoints of feminist practice. Consequently, these are measurable and offer practical resources for the general problem of gendering politics that operate in governance, resource distribution and a non-equal opportunity social/cultural power structure, under which minorities are disadvantaged. Feminist practice here refers to forms produced through feminist activities, ie, forms generated through relations with the matter of life through specific modalities of needs-based practices. (shrink)