A lecture by Dr Felicity Colman (Manchester School of Art)

Digital Feminicity : Activating a new materialist philosophy of technology for research and practice

This lecture will address how a neo-materialist perspective can be applied in media studies and digital studies, and research in practice and theory. In particular, it will examine this perspective through two of the fields of knowledge that profoundly altered the global social, political, and environmental landscape of the late twentieth century: the feminist movement, and the uptake of digital platforms. By the mid-1990s, digital technologies and the web and the feminist movement had irrevocably changed the form and the conditions of what it meant to be an entity- subject, citizen, institution, nation, state, artist, and philosopher.

Drawing examples from a feminist, neo-materialist philosophy of technology, as actioned in the respective works of Donna Haraway, Katherine N. Hayles, VNS Matrix, Stacy Alaimo, and others, the lecture argues that such feminist interventions denature the classical philosophical subject. Through acknowledgment of the materialist informatics of the formation and the forms of technological changes and their processual affects, what we can describe as a specific digital feminicity resituates the subject as posthuman, postgendered, and as digitally conceived.

Dr Felicity Colman is Reader in Screen Media at the Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. Dr Colman is the author of Film Theory: Creating a Cinematic Grammar (2014), Deleuze and Cinema (2011) and editor of Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (2009), co-editor of Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life (2007). Felicity is currently working on a new monograph, Digital Feminicity, and she is the vice-chair of the COST ActionIS1307: New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on 'How Matter Comes to Matter’ www.cost.eu/domains_actions/isch/Actions/IS1307