Hangover Reading Club #4 - Let's go with the flow - Hydrofeminism
Trafó Gallery's lazy Saturday morning reading group explores fresh theoretical approaches and critical perspectives that provide insight into larger-than-human worlds and belief systems that flow beyond solidified patterns of thinking and doing. The textual gatherings, led by invited curators, artists or theoreticians, often in conjunction with the exhibitions and events at Trafó Gallery, include discussions on posthuman theories, ecofeminism, queer ecologies, hydrofeminism, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology among other issues.
The next session of the reading group will take place from 11.30 am on 4 January 2020 and will be led by Judit Szalipszki, the curator of the exhibition Web of Wet. The texts read in the frameworks of the upcoming Hangover Reading Club are in English, while the discussions will be in Hungarian. We send the texts of each session beforehand via email for those who are interested. Thinking of heavy sleepers, nighthawks and of those who prefer to do the groceries early in the morning, the sessions begin at 11:30 am. Although the different reading sessions of Hangover Reading Club are related, it is not necessary to attend all sessions, the events are drop-in. Hangover Reading Club is free, all are welcome! For the themes and dates of past and future sessions of Hangover Reading Club, follow this link.
Let's go with the flow - Hydrofeminism
In the next edition of Hangover Reading Club we will be focusing on texts by Astrida Neimanis that unfold the concept of hydrofeminism. Water whirls us into global and planetary systems through intimate and mundane bodily processes, thus dissolving the increasingly unsustainable position that treats the matter of water as an entity, an externality, a resource outside human activity. Through the exploration of our relationship with water and our concepts of water, we can attempt to understand, perhaps even on a bodily, somatic level, the interdependence and dynamics which we live by. Hydrofeminism is a theoretical framework that interprets this system of relations through the logic of solidarity, and therefore offers an opportunity to re-tune, review, and decolonize our patterns of thought and turn to a new kind of material-based sensitivity towards the environmental consequences of individual and collective action.
As Neimanis writes: 'Watershed pollution, a theory of embodiment, amniotic becomings, disaster, environmental colonialism, how to write, global capital, nutrition, philosophy, birth, rain, animal ethics, evolutionary biology, death, storytelling, bottled water, multinational pharmaceutical corporations, drowning, poetry. These are all feminist questions and they are mostly inextricable from one another.' While thinking with and through water, we may attempt to map these systems, to understand and make sense of its entanglements and to localize our own, perpetually shifting position in them.
Astrida Neimanis is author of Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017), and known for developing the concept of hydrofeminism. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies as well as Key Researcher with the Sydney Environment Institute, both at the University of Sydney, on Gadigal Land, in Australia. Her research interests include posthuman feminisms, experimental writing methods, nature/culture, water, weather and climate change, environmental humanities, environmental justice and anti-colonial solidarity, embodiment, and feminist STS. She is particularly interested in the common and queer intersections of these things. Neimanis is also Associate Editor of the journal Environmental Humanities (Duke UP) as well as Co-Founder of the Environmental Humanities Collaboratory at Linkoping University (SE). Along with Jennifer Mae Hamilton, she is founder and convenor of COMPOSTING feminisms and the environmental humanities.
Supported by: National Cultural Fund of Hungary
