Handout

handout for: Plenary panel on "Crossing (Queer) Disciplines," (13 May 2006); 

Conference on "Global Queeries: Sexualities, Globalities, Postcolonialities,"

University of Western Ontario, Canada 

Cycling through Trans Knowledges in Queerish Landscapes

Katie King, Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College Park/katking@umd.edu

Home Page: http://www.womensstudies.umd.edu/wmstfac/kking/

ABSTRACT: How do the upheavals and connectivities of globalization processes train and access particular ways of thinking, knowing, making knowledge? How do Queerish practices model, mirror, incite, alter, inflame, articulate such knowledges? Trans Knowledges refuse what Bruno Latour calls "the Enlightenment Contract," that never stated agreement under which we allow ourselves to practice both "purification" and "hybridization" at the cost of keeping them apart, even misremembering that we always do both. Trans Knowledges practiced by such such novel scholars as Bailey Kier, Joy Sapinoso, Benjamin Alberti, and Eva Hayward allow us to cycle through Queerish practices generated within such refusals. Doing so we consider how globalization affects the kinds of questions we ask, the resources we put together to look into them, and infrastructural shifts among academic capitalisms. 

Clarke, Shim, Mamo, Fosket, Fishman (2003) and Transformation:

Clarke and her colleagues coin the term "technoscientific identities" "for the new genres of risk-based, genomics-based, epidemiology-based, and other technoscience-based identities." They "are produced through the application of sciences and technologies to our bodies directly and/or to our histories or bodily products including images."

Bailey Kier: a graduate student in American Studies at the University of Maryland while simultaneously also on the gay rodeo circuit in transition across genders, hormones, animal companions, classes, and academies. Kier's work nowadays takes its most public form in several blogs yet unconnected, requiring but open to searching. Kier's thoughtful gatherings telescope a range of academic and other flexible knowledges, coining the term Trans Knowledges. 

Joy Sapinoso: a Ph.D. candidate in Women's Studies at the University of Maryland in reflective participation among a range of regional sites of kinging culture, each with its own characteristic intersectional profile. Sapinoso's current work is engaged in closely examining the sites of U.S. immigration and kinging culture. 

Benjamin Alberti: an archeologist and an assistant professor in Sociology at Framingham State College who works to re-interpret bodily forms -- pots and people -- through an interest in various theories of genders, bodies, materialities, science studies. Meeting recently at an Andean archeology conference, we first got talking about his work on gender salience in Minoan Crete, where the sexed body is brought into being when a particular type of garment is combined with a body within a specific context of representation. 

Eva Hayward: just been finishing up a dissertation for the History of Consciousness at UC-Santa Cruz while simultaneously completing a first year as a faculty member in Media Arts at the University of New Mexico. Hayward's dissertation focuses on: 

Ciliated Bodies --
a ‘theory made’ and
an immersion into thick apparatuses:
a diffracted encounter, an alternate economy of visceral enmeshings of jellies, aquarium goers, human marine scientists and aquarists, a motley of assorted display and reproductive equipment, Hewlett-Packard technologies, Monterey Bay ecology/economy, public education, and serious scientific inquiry. 

Bruno Latour (1993): 

"So long as we consider these two practices of translation and purification separately, we are truly modern -- that is, we willingly subscribe to the critical project, even though that project is developed only through the proliferations of hybrids down below. As soon as we direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purification and the work of hybridization, we immediately stop being wholly modern, and our future begins to change. At the same time we stop having been modern, because we become retrospectively aware that the two sets of practices have always already been at work in the historical period that is ending. Our past begins to change. Finally, if we have never been modern -- at least in the way criticism tells the story -- the tortuous relations that we have maintained with the other nature-cultures would also be transformed."

Haraway in manuscript:

"Etching the adherent surfaces of contact sites with the tracks necessary to holding together, acid indigestion – not utopian critique – are the conditions of responsive co-constitutive multi-species encounterings in the mortal, finite worlds called domestic, wild, and feral. A robust appetite for life and a taste for excess are required to fulfill the ethics and erotics of curiosity. Flourishing depends perhaps less on eating well (pace Derrida) than on taking mutual partial digestion and a great deal of regurgitation seriously: companion species, cum panis, mess mates at table." 

Some materials referred to: 

• Alberti, B. (2001). "Faience goddesses and ivory bull-leapers: The aesthetics of sexual difference at Late Bronze Age Knossos." World archaeology, 33(2), 189-205.
• Clarke, A. E., J. K. Shim, et al. (2003). "Biomedicalization: Technoscientific transformations of health, illness, and U.S. biomedicine." American Sociological Review 68(2): 161-194.
• Haraway, D. (2003). The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm.
• Hayward, E. S. (2005). "Enfolded vision: Refracting the love life of the octopus." Octopus 1.
• Hayward, E. S. (2005). "The nature-culture divide; or, transdisciplining diversity." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 11(2), 322-324.
• Kier, B. (2004). "Gay rodeo: Defining urban and rural identities and the terms of community and national citizenship," LAVENDER LANGUAGES XI Conference. American University, Washington DC, 15 February.
• Latour, B. (1993 [1991]). We have never been modern (C. Porter, Trans.). Cambridge: Harvard.
• Sapinoso, J. (2005). "From 'Quare' to 'Kweer': Towards a queer Asian American critique" (Dissertation Prospectus, Women’s Studies, University of Maryland).

© May 2006 Katie King. Citation: King, Katie. "Cycling through Trans Knowledges in Queerish Landscapes." Paper presented at the panel on "Crossing (Queer) Disciplines" at the Conference on "Global Queeries: Sexualities, Globalities, Postcolonialities," University of Western Ontario, Canada, 13 May 2006. Available online at: http://katiekin.weebly.com/[last updated May 06; <your visit>]

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PDF of talk and pics for download here

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