In this piece we draw upon Donna Haraway's (2016) notion of the string figure to map affective-material entanglements in a postgraduate course on gender and education and how shared objects brought to class activated thought in collective, embodied, affective, and unpredictable ways. We explore how as yarn re-configured the relationality of the bodies and materialities in the classroom space, new pedagogical connectivities and ethical relationalities opened through relays and returns, giving and receiving, and affective 'response-abilities' across the assembled sets of hands, bodies, memories, materialities, and movements. We consider this as a practice of kinshipping and explore it as a pedagogical and methodological project for finding spaces of 'give' within the troubled lifeworld of the gender classroom. Yarning feminist pedagogies A ball of yarn unravels in rolls above desks, humming laptops, paper coffee cups, and human bodies. The yarn finds a hand amidst cheers and hoots. The yellow spool swiftly winds around a cookbook and then flies overhead to a new outreached hand. Next, it circles around a lipstick, a tampon, an iPhone and then is thrown again. It ducks under the buzzing ceiling projector and finds its way around a set of colorful beads, a flag, a plastic pack of birth control. Soon the room is a tangle of multi-colour thread, animated bodies, machines, and materialities.
This article explores a series of tentacular troublings inspired by Donna Haraway’s (2016) concept of String Figuring (SF). We consider these troublings as relational entanglements which produce perturbations of our gender, positioning, recognition, and respectability as feminist academics in Higher Education. We activate tentacular troublings as a refrain for contemplating differences/ings in our academic lives and as a critique of contemporary neo-liberal academia which ossifies, fixes, and freezes feminist flows. The article makes two contributions. The first is to deploy string figuring as a proposition for feminist thinking which troubles the notion of fixed positions in favour of position(ings)-plural in motion. The second is to enact string figuring as a mode of ecriture feminine (Cixous, 1976) in which connections are made, dropped, and picked up in tentacular relays and patterns of entangled encounters, thereby perturbing normative modes of writing and troubling traditional modes of knowledge making. Feeling Medusa helps us with this work. Medusa, as powerful woman, Amazon goddess and gorgon, and vilified proto-feminist whose glance turns men to stone is knotted into our perturbations and troublings; her presence informs and inspires our SF-ing.
Partaking in some of the material and affective moments and movements that emerged from my PhD research, I map the ontological, epistemological, and ethical possibilities/impossibilities that trans-corporeality and trans-materiality open in my research. Using walking and photo-diary as PhEmaterialist multisensory methodologies, I followed 15 Muslim schoolgirls in two London secondary schools (East Dulwich and Bethnal Green) mapping relational materialities between things that matter for them in their ordinary everyday practices and experiences. Employing Jane Bennett’s creative and absorbent I as a partaker rather than either actor or recipient, taking in and being taken up by virtues specific to the moment, this article materializes some partaker agencies and “more-thans” that Maha (my PhD participant) and I walked, made, challenged, and became with in different “spacetimematterings.” I argue that social injustice and inequalities, gendered and racial harassment as political, ethical, and material issues, are not always raised by those represented or able to name and speak up as part of social structures but emerge through complex webs of power relations and ordinary, everyday material moments and affective encounters. I consider bodies of walking as partakers of influx and efflux, many “I”s, moving and making the moments and experiences of racial harassment, affective entanglements, and the potentialities of the virtual, material, and affective that emerge in-between human and more-than-human walking bodies.
This paper materialises the affective emergence of watery assemblages between sea, shark, swimming and British-Bangladeshi Muslim schoolgirls of my PhD research. Watery assemblages pushed further my participant’s lived experiences into another layer of ‘force field of differentiation’ (Alaimo, Bodily natures: Science, environment, and the material self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010, p. 14) where stories, flesh and sea became no longer discrete, where the ground is not solid but watery, the movement is not walking or speaking but swimming and the body is not just human but human-animal. Watery assemblages enabled the fluid and affective entanglements with complex and thick experiences of gender and racial harassment. Entangling with images and stories I explore how the affective and material agency of sea, swimming and shark as concept and a performative multiplicity (Protevi, Life, war, earth: Deleuze and the sciences. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013) works as praxis and provocations for thinkings and doings.
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