Posts
- Event: Susana Draper, February 17
- Event: Mark McGurl, February 16-17
The Critical Contemporary Studies Workshop is thrilled to invite you to our first event of the semester. Distinguished scholar Professor Mark McGurl will visit on Thursday, Feb. 16th and Friday, Feb. 17th. Thursday’s public lecture and Friday’s workshop are presented with funding support from the Institute for the Humanities.
- Marxisms Collective: “Witches and Cyborgs: Materialist Feminist Debates on Extractivism, Technoscience, and Reproduction”
This year the marxisms collective RIW will focus on coordinating a series of reading and discussion groups on a theme titled “Witches and cyborgs: Materialist feminist debates on extractivism, technoscience, and reproduction.” Throughout the year we will be engaging with the writings of Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Angela Y. Davis, Veronica Gago, Shulamith Firestone, Donna Haraway, Helen Hester and Sophie Lewis.
In the wake of the pandemic and the proliferation of class struggles for social reproduction and against racialized and gendered forms of premature death a crisis that looms over all struggles is that of ecological disaster. How have materialist feminists theorized the interlocking aspects of this multifaceted crisis?
On the one hand, in feminist struggles throughout the world the archaic figure of “the witch” emerges as a disruptive naturalist force against the contemporary forms of extraction (of bodies, territories and in digital worlds). This is perhaps most clearly theorized by Silvia Federici’s seminal book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation and also been taken up by feminist thinker Veronica Gago in the wake of the Latin American feminist “green tide” (see Feminist International: How to change everything).
On the other hand, in contemporary struggles it is also possible to trace the distinct futurist figure of “the cyborg” which turns towards the repurposing of capitalist technoscience for emancipatory goals. This tendency can be read in the works of Donna Haraway’s “A cyborg manifesto” and, more recently, in the anti-naturalist, technomaterialist and gender abolitionist variants of “xenofeminism.” The vital relevance of these debates on reproduction, extractivism and technoscience can also be read in the recent (and to some quite polemical) call by Sophie Lewis – following the “cyborg” and xenofeminist line– to abolish the family.
A group of us have selected a series of writings that will frame some of the relevant debates that span the spectrum delimited by these two apparent polarities.
For more information on the Marxisms Collective, visit: https://umichmarx.org - Event: Silvia Federici, November 11, 2022
Join us for this free and open to the public hybrid event!
——
Silvia Federici is a feminist activist, writer, and a teacher. In 1972, she was one of the cofounders of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the Wages For Housework campaign internationally. In the 1990s, after a period of teaching and research in Nigeria, she was active in the anti-globalization movement and the U.S. anti–death penalty movement. She is one of the co-founders of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, an organization dedicated to generating support for the struggles of students and teachers in Africa against the structural adjustment of African economies and educational systems. From 1987 to 2005 she taught international studies, women studies, and political philosophy courses at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY. All through these years she has written books and essays on philosophy and feminist theory, women’s history, education and culture, and more recently on the worldwide struggle against capitalist globalization and feminist reconstruction of the commons.