Queer Inhumanisms

Luciano, Dana; Chen, Mel Y.

doi:10.1215/10642684-7275600

Cited by 11 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Posthumanism contributes to the discourse that problematizes the category of human, including feminist theory, disability studies, antiracist and anticolonial work (for example , Wynter 2003;Deckha 2012;Goodley, Lawthom, and Runswick Cole 2014;Luciano and Chen 2019). As thinkers such as Wynter (2003) and Plumwood (1993) document, this category of human-or more specifically, man-has been used to separate man from nature.…”

Section: Eating In Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Posthumanism Invited to Dinner: Exploring the Potential of a More-Than-Human Perspective in Food Studies

Elton

2019

Gastronomica

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A chicken thigh seasoned with the lemony accents of sumac. On the side, rice cooked with small brown lentils topped with onions, fried until brown and crispy. Leafy greens, steamed, salted, dressed with olive oil. What is happening here? Well, dinner awaits the diner, a hungry human wishing to nourish the body and satisfy the taste buds. Food will be tasted, digested, and transformed by bodily functions into nutrients and waste. Or maybe not.What happens at the dinner table if we take a posthumanist perspective and consider the agency of the nonhuman? Posthumanism is the term I use to group the theories and approaches that seek to remove humans 1 from a self-appointed role as supreme actor on planet earth and recognize meaning and agency in other life forms-and even phenomena and matter. Posthumanism levels the playing field-flattens the ontology-and provides a framework for a radically different world of networks, assemblages, companionship, relating and interrelating.Food studies has yet to fully reckon with nonhuman agency. Typical in food studies is what Bennett (2007: 133) calls the "conquest model of consumption," a conception of eating that involves humans consuming and digesting inert matter. I add production to this model since the prevailing conception of farming and agri-food systems casts the human as the grower, producer, and transformer of food (as noted by Goodman 1999). This conquest model of production and consumption disregards the agency of the vegetable or animal, bacteria, soil biota, watersheds, climate, and all the nonhuman things and systems that act, influence, shape, and make food for humans possible-or not. The theoretical framework of posthumanism upends so much of what we know and think about food and how it is produced, transformed, and even what happens when

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Section: Eating In Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Posthumanism Invited to Dinner: Exploring the Potential of a More-Than-Human Perspective in Food Studies

Elton

2019

Gastronomica

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“…For Jackson (2015: 216), posthumanist calls to move ‘beyond the human’ too often ‘ignore praxes of humanity and critiques produced by black people’, while for Gilroy (2014: 72, 67) the real task is that of ‘reenchanting and resituating humanism’, so that a category historically founded on the abjection of racialised ‘infrahuman’ others might finally deliver on its promises of unconditional inclusion. For Luciano and Chen (2019: 113, 115) the term posthuman suggests ‘a singular chronology of “human,” asserting the solidity of a concept that has never, in truth, been stable’; they propose the term ‘queer inhumanism’ as an alternative rubric for work that ‘underscore[s] the need for interspecies thinking’ while ‘index[ing] habits and histories of dehumanization’. These thinkers raise important concerns as to the limitations and blindspots of existing strains of posthumanist critique.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Humanising gaming? The politics of posthuman agency in autobiographical videogames

Gallagher

2022

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Med

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For many commentators autobiographical videogames represent a step towards a more human vision of digital play, promising to transform a medium still widely associated with mindless and dehumanising virtual violence into a vector for self-expression, empathy and understanding. Viewed through the lens of life-writing theory, however, the situation looks somewhat different. As scholar in this fieldhave shown, works of auto/biography and life-writing have been instrumental in propagating ideas about agency, politics and the human that remain both pervasive and pernicious. Their work suggests that if we are to talk about ‘humanising’ videogames we must first address how understandings of the human are constituted and who they have historically excluded. Here developments in life-writing theory align with recent scholarship on how videogames undercut the liberal humanist conception of the autonomous agential subject by implicating players in complex assemblages of human and non-human actors. This work holds out another way of reading the encounter between gaming and auto/biography: as a catalyst for new forms of posthumanist life-writing, in which the autobiographical mode co-exists with what this article dubs the ludobiographical mode. If games are autobiographical to the extent that they involve creators giving an account of episodes from their own life, they are ludobiographical to the extent that they foreground the challenges videogames pose to humanism’s vision of autonomous individuals in possession of their own bodies, stories and identities. This idea is elaborated through an analysis of That Dragon, Cancer ( Numinous Games, 2016 ). Created by Ryan and Amy Green, the game documents the death of their developmentally disabled son Joel and their consequent crisis of faith. Controversial and widely discussed, it constitutes a rich case study in how autobiographical videogames raise irreducibly political questions about agency, identity and the (post)human.

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Creatrix Witches, Nonbinary Creatures, and Shelleyan Transmedia

Singer

2024

Percy Shelley for Our Times

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Queer Inhumanisms

Cited by 11 publications

References 1 publication

Posthumanism Invited to Dinner: Exploring the Potential of a More-Than-Human Perspective in Food Studies

Posthumanism Invited to Dinner: Exploring the Potential of a More-Than-Human Perspective in Food Studies

Humanising gaming? The politics of posthuman agency in autobiographical videogames

Creatrix Witches, Nonbinary Creatures, and Shelleyan Transmedia

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