Doing Gender Lecture (open to all)

(open to all and free attendance, but compulsory to register via nog@uu.nl)

Prof. Lynne Huffer’s lecture is part of the DOING GENDER Lecture Series which the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG) organizes regularly at Utrecht University. This series of lectures stresses the importance of doing gender work combined with an active involvement in the practice of gender theory and research. The concept of ‘doing gender’ supports a hands-on approach to gender issues in the sense of social and political engagement with the new forms of gender inequalities that are taking shape in the world today. Prof. Huffer’s lecture is coorganized by the NOG and the OZSW (Research School of Philosophy)

Abstract
Prof dr. Lynne Huffer: ‘Wanton Extinction: Queer Feminist Ethics in the Anthropocene’

This talk seeks to engage and unsettle some of the assumptions that undergird contemporary new materialisms and the ecological thinking to which much of that work is bound. Drawing on the method of Foucauldian genealogy, the paper asks about ethics in the context of the Anthropocene and contemporary discourses of mass extinction. If the Anthropocene is a problem of our time, how do we engage in ethics talk within a frame that paradoxically both recenters and exceeds the human? The paper argues that Foucault’s archival method offers a way to approach this question through a focus on earth archives as historical traces of other-than-human beings. Engaging specifically the long debated question of when the Anthropocene started, I offer a decolonial queer feminist perspective on these origin stories as bound to the epistemic and moral foundations of a modern Western anthropos that masks his own emergence through genocidal violence. The earth archive as ice core offers an alternative story to this usual humanist narrative. Drawing on the speech we might hear in the ice, I ultimately argue for a queer feminist mode of ethical questioning as a limit-attitude that temporarily suspends the modes of intelligibility of our present. In this way I hope to reopen the question of Anthropocene ethics as a simultaneously human and posthuman endeavor.

Research seminar

The research seminar will provide the participants with the opportunity to present on their research in 15 minutes, followed by a response by Prof. dr. Lynne Huffer and a general discussion. There will be room for 8 presentations. In the occasion the number of students presenting on their research exceeds the available time, students will be offered the opportunity to submit an essay. The essays will be evaluated by the coordinators of the masterclass.