Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Imagining queerness desire beyond the human destabilizes the premise that “normativity” is in any way “natural,” and provides unique frameworks to dismantle any claims for such ways of thinking. This interdisciplinary project puts choreographic research in direct dialogue with current scholarship in new materialisms and transgender studies to examine constitution and subject-formation– of how bodies and objects take shape in the world and towards one another beyond what we immediately see or sense in front of us. I propose image and form as illusion, and the extent of constitution is never fully available passed on representation. While my approach varies in scale, from citing quantum theory and particle physics to more-than-human erotic exchanges and queer porn, I intentionally analyze various sites to express the ways in which certain philosophies and attitudes toward interspecies ecologies are transferrable through all of them. This project assumes the premise that we both produce the material realities we live in and are simultaneously produced by them through on-going negotiations of desire, the world always already queerly entangled with numerous ongoing interspecies relationships. This paper considers gender as an aggregate experience, the body as a site of multi-critter assemblage. This research aims to make visible these contingencies so that we may better articulate and redefine our relationships and roles within them, and to offer new strategies to structurally rebut colonial and capitalist mentalities. This project centralizes choreographic principles to reveal alternative modes of theorizing power and subjectivity.