Our project
The project addresses the answers for conflicts and situations arising in creative texts circulated in the last two decades of the twenty-first century that demand new solutions. The project aims to introduce the concept of “queer practices” in order to open up our understanding of contemporary life with the denunciation of certain exclusionary modes still present in today’s complex, multicultural and transnational societies that are either implicitly accepted or explicitly questioned in recent narratives. “Queer practices” draw from theories of material feminism (Ahmed, Alaimo), trans* theories (Halberstram) and/or critical posthumanism (Ferrando, Braidotti), all of them interconnected in their denunciation of power hierarchies and oppressive binarisms. Thus, the project aims to introduce new analytical tools that, in combination with more traditional approaches to literary texts, will be applied to recent narratives in English that engage in “queer practices”. These texts unpack for readers exclusionary, oppressive, and/or life-denying modes of relation present in our societies and impacting negatively our embodied selves and our relationality in multiple ways.
Objective 1
To analyze how post 9/11 narratives in English detect inequalities and oppression present in our contemporary societies that affect our embodied subjectivities and contribute to the denial of fluid and healthy relations.
Objective 2
To identify “queer practices” or transformative practices that construct inclusive spaces of trans-formation.
Two approaches
Our project is divided into two different research clusters or approaches.
Queer Use
Based on the discussion of contemporary issues and their role in revising and rewriting the past to find projection on current concerns. Theories of queer use/misuse/abuse will be applied.
Queer Embodiment
Discussing post 9/11 narratives that provide readers and/or spectators with futuristic or transformative visions of our embodied selves, putting the emphasis on bodies and their relationality in constructive ways.
“Queer uses, when things are used for purposes other than the ones for which they were intended, still reference the qualities of things; queer uses may linger on those qualities, rendering them all the more lively”.
Sara Ahmed
What’s the Use: On The Uses of Use (2019)
Affiliation