Taking this posnatural framework as a starting point, “ECO? TRANS? TECHNO? CYBER? QUEER? POST? HYDRO? XENO? FEMINISMS” is a seminar exploring the plurality of eco-feminist viewpoints, their multiple agendas and departing points, their agreements and disagreements. Rather than aligning ourselves with a specific position, we are interested in following the lines of diffraction of contemporary feminisms in relation to fossil-capitalism, ecology, race, non-human body-minds, the informatics of domination, technology, rationality, the cyber world, etc.

One of the most important questions that fuels this seminar is who is the “we” of feminism, of the multiple feminisms that constantly enmesh and interact. And how can “we” stay together, despite our different approaches. How can “we” create collectivity without sameness, and bypass the pull towards homogeneity that suffocates many social struggles? But also, what kind of political fiction is being mobilized in the name of “women’s experience”? And what “other” beings and experiences does that fiction leave behind? From the Institute, we believe that all identities are partial, contradictory, and strategic, and that “we” need to constitute our colectivities through affinity, not identity; privileging not singularity but an ocean of differences.

This seminar offers a space meant to be the beginning of an intellectual, embodied, collective, diffractive, emotional journey that brings us closer to the possibility of a world, or many worlds, where thinking together, unknowing, and building modes of affective affiliation become possible. How do we create a safe space that can hold and respect the individual and the collective simultaneously? What are the frontiers of personal infringement and how can these frontiers make us stronger as a necessarily heterogeneous group without harming anyone in the process? What happens when those perhaps conflictive needs clash, or bounce, or hybridize? A safe space is not safe because it is free of harm or conflict, but because it is permanently open to enacting healing and reparation processes.

Session I 16 / 10 / 2023 - Introduction by Institute for Postnatural Studies

Introduction to the seminar: its motivation, framework, and speakers. Introduction to feminism through the lens of postnature (and its other face, posthumanism) and a critique of the gendered dichotomy between nature and culture, or nature and technology. We will explore how our conceptualizations of the natural and the unnatural, as well as of animality and rationality, technology and science, necessarily reverberate in gender politics. We will analyze the philosophical concept of “becoming woman” and the potentiality of queer and trans* body-minds as posthuman figurations.

Clara Benito is an independent researcher based in Madrid, currently part of the Institute for Postnatural Studies as a researcher, speaker in workshops and seminars, as well as co-editor, writer and proofreader within the Institute's publishing house of critical thought and ecology Chtulhu Books. With a background in philosophy and visual arts, Clara has a research master's degree rMA Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and has been part of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA) since 2018. Her research, interdisciplinary in nature but with a strong influence from philosophy, touches on topics such as posthumanism, animal studies, queer theory and feminist and gender studies, decolonial theory and environmental humanities.

Session II 23 / 10 / 2023 - Amy Ireland This session will introduce xenopoetics as a philosophical concept interrogating the centrality of the human through examples of the ‘zone’ trope in contemporary science fiction. We will then explore how the figure of spatio-temporal anomaly dramatised in these examples can be used to provide a deep reading of cyberfeminism—one that addresses contemporary criticisms and clearly situates it within a feminist legacy of transcendental philosophy.

Amy Ireland is an Australian writer and theorist based in the UK. Her research focuses on gender and technology in modernity, and she is a member of the technomaterialist transfeminist collective, Laboria Cuboniks. Filosofía-Ficción, a collection of writings on philosophy and aesthetics in Spanish translation, was published by Holobionte in 2022.

Session III 30 / 10 / 2023 - Mindy Seu Edited by designer, professor, and researcher Mindy Seu, Cyberfeminism Index includes more than 700 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, and bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art. Both a vital introduction for laypeople and a robust resource guide for educators, Cyberfeminism Index—an anti-canon, of sorts—celebrates the multiplicity of practices that fall under this imperfect categorization and makes visible cyberfeminism’s long-ignored origins and its expansive legacy.

Mindy Seu is a designer and technologist based in New York City, currently teaching as an Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art. Her expanded practice involves archival projects, techno-critical writing, performative lectures, and design commissions. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three decades of online activism and net art, was commissioned by Rhizome, presented at the New Museum, and awarded a Graham Foundation Grant.

Session IV 06 / 11 / 2023 - Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone Speculative writer, artist, scholar and pleasure activist Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone joins us for a session of reading, sharing and feeling through Black ecofeminisms, bodily knowledges and more-than-human-memory. Building on the groundbreaking work of Black feminist ecological activists and thinkers, Budge Johnstone invites us to shift the ground through which we conceptualise the relationships between Black subjectivity and liberatory interspecies futures. Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone is a speculative writer, artist, scholar and pleasure activist whose praxis navigates that which she has termed “Intimate Ecologies” to explore Blackness, aesthetics and queer, pleasurable, interspecies futures. Ama is an Associate Lecturer at University of the Arts London: Central Saint Martins, and also teaches at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. Ama’s wider intra-disciplinary work thinks through sustainable ecologies of care and more-than-survival for BIPoC women and queer folk in the arts and academia. She has had essays, short fiction and art writing published internationally, and has been exhibited across Europe. Ama is a curatorial fellow with Frame Contemporary Art Finland (Helsinki) and EVA International (Limerick); a participant of the first Postnatural Independent Programme (Madrid); and was the 2020/21 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism with Bard College (New York). Ama’s work has been translated into Twi, German and Swedish.

Session V 13 / 11 / 2023 - Carmen Lael Hines In this session, we will begin by addressing Materialist Ecofeminism, one branch of ecofeminism(s) that explores the gender binary through the lens of capitalism, labour, reproduction, and the enclosure of the commons. This will frame discussion on one of the many reproductive spheres of platform capitalism, broadly referred to as femtech. With particular focus on digital contraception and digital reproductive technologies, we will consider the visual media attached to these platforms, and question where aesthetics become a means of essentialization, discipline, and instrumentalization in an era of bio-capitalist tentacularity. How could we imagine alternative, digital reproductive technologies based in and through intersectional commons?

Carmen Lael Hines is a writer, researcher and curator particularly interested in tech, bodies, and the implications of their entanglements. She is currently lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at the Technical University of Vienna, where she teaches on new media theory, with courses such as: The Platform is My Boyfriend and Feminist Spatialities in the Digital Age. Her most recent writings have concerned topics such as: neoliberalism and aesthetics, femtech, home automation, dating apps, platform urbanism, and the architectures of finance. She is currently co-editing the book: Dissident Practices: Posthumanist Approaches to Critique of Political Economy, to be published by Bloomsbury. She was on the curatorial team for ‘Platform Austria,’ Austria’s contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021, and has also curated exhibitions/programmes at: e-flux screening room NY, The Austrian Cultural Forum NY, Architekturzentrum Wien(as part of the Claiming*Space Collective), Galerie Kandlhofer, and Parallel Vienna, amongst others. She has lectured in teaching programs at: The Royal Institute of Art Stockholm, The University of Bologna, the Institute of Contemporary Art TU Graz, The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, amongst others. In 2023, she will co-curate the exhibition ‘Bordering Plants’ in the Exhibit Galerie at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She recently started a podcast with Morgane Billuart called GirlEmployee, which explores digitial feminism(s), platform capitalism, and visual culture. Session VI 20 / 11 / 2023 More information coming soon.