Body and identity

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27 january 2022

Body and Identity: Metamorphosis in the Digital Age

How do we conceptualize our body? It once was customary to derive a person’s identity from his or her inalienable bodily ‘‘constants’’ of gender and race, but studies in the humanities have altered this view significantly since the 1970s. The iconic American philosopher Judith Butler, whose most famous books include Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), writes that a person cannot be defined through gender or social roles imposed from outside: a person’s identity is defined by their actions alone.

On the other hand, Michel Foucault argued that the human body is a product of social construction and disciplinary power. In his 1978 work Discipline and Punish, Foucault highlights ‘‘the moment when an art of the human body was born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, nor at the intensification of its subjection, but at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely. What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behavior. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it’’.

These days, technology and algorithms invade our life like never before – they are even becoming part of our physical experience. This discussion will examine how the narrative surrounding the body has changed in this digital age in the wake of the new opportunities provided by artificial intelligence. We will discuss how our bodies and identities are impacted by social media and the contemporary ‘‘overachievement’’ ethos, and we will reflect on what it means when a distinction is drawn between bodies that are ‘‘useful’’ and those that are ‘‘useless’’.

As stated by the art duo Elmgreen & Dragset in connection with their exhibition Useless Bodies? coming up in March at the Fondazione Prada in Milan, ‘‘our bodies are no longer the main agents of our existence. They don’t generate value in our societies’ advanced production methods as they did in the industrial era. One could claim our physical selves have even become more of an obstacle than an advantage. In the 19th century, the body was the producer of daily goods, whereas, in the 20th century, the body’s role became more that of the consumer. 20 years into the 21st century the status of the body is now that of the product -- with our data gathered and sold by Big Tech’’. The conversation will explore the concepts of ‘‘human body as product’’ and the ‘‘post-human body’’. We will also reflect on some ways to safeguard the boundaries of our physical self and identity going forward and reinvent them in the new world we are currently building for ourselves.

27 January 2022, 8 p.m. UTC+3

Registration

The event is part of the international UK–Russia Creative Bridge programme 2021–2022 supported by the Cultural and Education Section of the British Embassy in Moscow

SPEAKERS

Supplemental Materials

speakers

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Helen Hester
Helen Hester — Associate Professor of Gender, Technology and Cultural Politics
London School of Film, Media and Design
Her research interests include technofeminism, sexuality studies, and theories of social reproduction, and she is a member of the international feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks.
Helen is the author of Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014) and the co-editor of the collections Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism (Ashgate, 2015) and Dea ex Machina (Merve, 2015). She is also the series editor for Ashgate’s 'Sexualities in Society' book series.
Marie Chancel
Marie Chancel — Postdoctoral researcher on the MetAction projet (ERC), LPNC CNRS, Université Grenoble Alpes
Marie’s work focuses on how noisy and sometimes conflicting sensory inputs are integrated and merged into a coherent and unique percept of our body. To address this issue, she combines behavioral experiments with computational approaches, electrophysiological measurements, and neuroimaging methods to investigate multiple sides of the question of self-body perception. Co-author of articles in Neuroscience, Neuropsychologia, Attention, Perception & Psychophysics and other journals.
Anna Kirikova
Event moderated by Anna Kirikova, Director of International Projects, Manege.
Creator and programme director of NEW NOW programme.

materials

Publication
Donna Haraway. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century // Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Abingdon: Routledge, 1990

Publication
We will get regular body upgrades: what will humans look like in 100 years? // The Guardian, 2018

Publication
Michel Foucault. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995

Publication
Michel Foucault. Confessions of the Flesh: The History of Sexuality. Vol. 4. New York: Vintage Books, 2022

Publication
Jean-Luc Nancy. Corpus. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008

Publication
Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Penguin Classics, 2009

Publication
Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987

Publication
Nancy Katherine Hayles. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. University Chicago Press, 1999

Publication
Francis Fukuyama. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

Podcast
Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying. Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life // FUTURES Podcast, 2021

Publication
Cary Wolfe. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010

Publication
Rosi Braidotti. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013

Publication
Rosi Braidotti. The Posthuman Feminism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021

Publication
Posthuman Bodies / Eds. by Judith M. Halberstam and Ira Livingston. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995

Publication
Hari Kunzru. You Are Cyborg // WIRED, 1997

Publication
Sadie Plant. Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture. Doubleday, 1997

Publication
Helen Hester. “Biology is not destiny, it can be technologically transformed” // CCCB Lab, 2019

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