Race/Gender Matters

These work-in-progress (WIP) sessions have been organised by the Race/Gender Matters (R/GM) research group. In these sessions we will discuss the research in development of staff and PGRs who are based at or who are visiting KSA. Their research has in common a desire to engage, critically or creatively, with race, gender, sexuality and/or materiality.

Typically, the work will be shared up to a week in advance of the session in which it will be discussed. You can access it via this box folder .

All WiP sessions take place on Wednesdays, from 5pm-6.30pm, in Penrhyn Road's John Galsworthy building (unless happening online). Everyone is welcome to attend!

16 November 2022, JG2004

Perry Hughes, ‘Food and the Maternal as Biblical Abomination in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene'

7 December 2022, JG2004

Sofía Martinicorena Zaratiegui, ‘Narrative Reactions to Suburban Heterotopias'

11 January 2023 (Cancelled. To be rescheduled, date TBC.)

Anna Johnson, ‘Failures of Feeling: Motherhood and Haunting'

8 February 2023, JG1010

Éadaoin Agnew and Shuhita Bhattacharjee (Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad), 'Gods and Monsters in fin de siècle India'

8 March 2023, JG1001

Katie Hall, ‘Under the Influencer: a work in progress'

29 March 2023, JG1010

Simon Brown, ‘The "nasties" revisited: James Herbert and the legacy of 1970s British literary horror'

7 February, Reg Bailey Building 0006, Penrhyn Road, 5.30-7.30pm

This February is LGBTQ history month; please join us for a special screening of Orfeas 2021, a Queer Sci-Fi Opera by artist duo FYTA.

Based on a radical reworking of Monteverdi's opera L'Orfeo (1607), Orfeas 2021 is, according to its makers, ‘a retro-futurist story of utopian politics, ideological conflicts, supernatural leaders and totalitarian spectacle, which pits ‘cyberpunk queer pirates against rainbow homo-capitalist normies' and ‘revolution vs reformism; logic vs affect'.

This contemporary take on the myth of Orpheus oscillates between ‘operatic melodrama, queer DIY collage, 80s-inspired post-trash hauntology and VR/AI aesthetics', thereby creating ‘a kaleidoscopic take on political purity, alternative histories and institutional critique'.

What more could you possibly want from LGBTQ history month?

The event will be followed by small discussion between one of the film makers, Dr Foivos Dousos, and Kingston University's Dr Caoimhe Mader McGuinness. The pair will explore the film's aesthetic and political strategies before opening up the conversation to a Q&A with the audience. All are welcome.

More information about the project, visit the Orfeas 2021 website.

27-28 April 2023, Penrhyn Road Campus, Kingston University

Sexuality, Motherhood and Social Reproduction: a transdisciplinary symposium on representing the visceral body in theory and creative practice

This two-day, transdisciplinary symposium will explore how renewed attention to the human (and specifically female) body in philosophy, politics, literature and psychosocial studies has paved the way for a rethinking of motherhood, reproductive loss, disability and death beyond the biological category. How does this reflection contribute to naming, elaborating, and making visible concrete aspects of human life in their connection to gender, race, sexuality?

The event will present creative writing, poetic works, lectures and performances which illustrate, inform or question how we represent the visceral body within text and in philosophical /political inquiries when we attempt to give voice to experiences and events that are, by their nature (within cultural frameworks, of course) graphic, shocking, bloody, illicit...

We ask, how do we navigate the ‘horror' or embarrassment of these subjects through writing and theoretical reflection? How do we share real and even brutal experiences without them becoming sensational or shocking in a way that negates their complexity? What kind of literary forms, what kinds of language, do we turn to in our attempts?

This is not about how we make these experiences palatable, but, rather, how we battle to make them communicable in a way that does not underestimate the experience and allows us to see it from multiple perspectives.

We will address these questions through a combination of presentations and performances by PhD students, academics, writers and dancers.

Keynote speakers: Professor Lisa Baraitser, poet Rachel Long, Dr Anna McFarlane and Professor Tracey Reynolds

For more information, and to register, please visit the Visual Bodies Symposium website or contact the organisers, Anna Argirò and Anna Johnson.

21 June 2023, JG3003, Penrhyn Road Campus, Kingston University

This one-day, in-person, interdisciplinary symposium will build on this work to uncover, explore, recognise, and celebrate those stories, peoples, and objects, hiding in plain sight, with a particular focus on the 18th-century history, culture, and literature of not only Britain but also Europe, North America, and the wider world.

The symposium will bring together a range of speakers, including researchers, education providers, practitioners, and individuals working in the cultural and creative industries, to showcase the work of those who are using 'texts' (in the broadest sense) to provide a platform for those previously overlooked 18th-century stories to be listened to. Participants will also consider how we can enhance our pedagogical practices to be more inclusive. What does it mean to decolonise the curriculum; who decides and why?

In addition to round-table panels and opportunities for informal networking and conversation, the symposium will feature a morning keynote, delivered by the 18th- and early-19th-century historian, Dr Hannah Young, and a late afternoon keynote, delivered by the independent scholar, art historian and curator, Adrienne Childs.

The ‘Speaking Texts' symposium will close with the author and actor Paterson Joseph, who will talk about his debut novel The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho (2022).

Touching on topics relevant to all of us, whether we are staff or students, researchers or museum visitors, experts or interested members of the public, this symposium will be of interest to all, and all are welcome. It is free to attend, but participants will need to reserve a place in advance. For more information and to register, see the Speaking Texts Eventbrite page.

Event held in collaboration with the Literary London Reading Group at Ram Books, London, 5 November 2019.

Soho Typescripts were a distinctive type of handmade pornography associated with London's Soho. Thousands were produced in the 1950s and 1960s, of which only a small proportion survive. Kingston's Helen Wickstead discussed how the consolidation of production and consumption networks around Soho was linked to an alternative economy regulated though informal alliances between bookshop owners and police. Retailers classified obscene typescripts through their placement within bookshops and using folk-sexological slang. Soho Typescripts are disproportionately under-represented in British institutional collections. Consequently the significance and reach of this hand-crafted commercial pornography may have been underestimated. This event took place at Ram Books, which has the world's largest and most important collection of this mode of pornography.

Held at Kingston University, 23 October 2019

In this dance workshop, somatics and mindfulness were used to explore how oppression is rooted in the body and how we can shift its hold on our lives using mindful attention and movement.

This work was inspired by Camille Barton's ongoing research into somatics and social justice: exploring how trauma from oppression is rooted in the body and how it can be healed with movement and mindfulness.

Camille Barton is a movement artist who brings her passion for social change to life through a variety of art mediums, including dance, film and clowning. Their art practice fuses improvisation, ritual and Afrofuturism to weave new realities inspired by the creativity of the African Diaspora.

Two-day conference held at Kingston University, 6 to 7 June 2019

Keynotes:

Emmanuela Bianchi (New York University), ‘Genos Between Nature and Hegemony'

Martin Dines (Kingston), ‘Houses, comics, fish: graphic narrative ecologies of the American suburban home'

Symposium held at Kingston University 21 June 2018

Organised by Chiara Alfano; co-sponsored by Race/Gender Matters and The Leverhulme Trust

We have never known more about babies than we do today. Indeed, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the turn to infancy seems ubiquitous. For psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, psychology, neuroscience and many other disciplines the turn to infancy has been transformative. Yet, the complexity of our cultural attitudes towards infancy (from birth to 18 months) only seems to intensify with our discoveries. Given the pervasiveness and complexity of our preoccupation with infancy, it is remarkable that the turn to infancy itself has not attracted more critical attention.

This symposium provided a space in which researchers from across the arts, humanities, and sciences, as well as health care and early years practitioners, and artists could exchange perspectives, explore possible overlaps in inquiry, and map out future directions for the field.