Contemporary Conversation: Making Queer Kin
How do the logics of care repeat and renew racist, anti-migrant, nationalist, and capitalist assumptions?
This Contemporary Conversation explores accountability in our relationships to colonial pasts, our implication in petrochemical presents and our desire for different futures. Taking as a starting point the new bacteria being birthed by the rise of plastic, this event asks how we might take responsibility for reconfiguring categories of kin making beyond lineal ancestry and normative family units against the backdrop of environmental devastation. By exploring our different inheritances and differential responsibilities towards climate injustice, this dialogue explores the duality of care in relation to life-promoting projects that do not reproduce the social orders of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. While gesturing towards a world in which many worlds can flourish, this conversation is an opportunity to explore kin making at the intersection of reproductive and environmental justice struggles.
The series Contemporary Conversations looks at how art is positioned to the present. Acknowledging artists’ roles in working with its passage, pressing and transforming it, this series of evening dialogues explores the present tense in its cultural and political dimensions, visual cultures and postcolonial debates.
About the event
Online. Free. Live Stream.
You can access this event through this webpage and on the Nottingham Contemporary YouTube channel.
There will be automated live captioning for this event.
A transcription will be available for download on this webpage afterwards.
We are unable to provide British Sign Language interpretation for this event.
A recording of the event will be available afterwards.
The duration of the event is two hours. A rest break is not included.
Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at the New School. She is the co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments, and Epistemologies (2015) and editor of Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada. Her current book project, Plastic Matter, re-examines materiality in light of plastic’s saturation. She is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes.
Sophie Lewis is a feminist theorist, cultural critic and utopianist based in Philadelphia. She is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family as well as many articles and essays including, lately, “My Octopus Girlfriend” (n+1) and “How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans” (The New York Times). Lewis is visiting scholar at The Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality and Women at the University of Pennsylvania, and teaches online (open to all) at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Currently, she is working on a second book about anti-liberatory strands of feminism in history and in the present.
Supported by:
