This interview between Sunaura Taylor and Sara E S Orning took place digitally, over the course o... more This interview between Sunaura Taylor and Sara E S Orning took place digitally, over the course of several months in the spring of 2020, during the time that the COVID-19 pandemic exploded around the world The exchanges have been edited into the four conversations presented here, dealing with human and nonhuman life, death and vulnerability, racial and environmental justice, and extinction Sunaura Taylor is the author of Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, which won the 2018 American Book Award She is Assistant Professor of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley Her work, which argues for the need to bring animal and disability activism together, has been influential and pioneering in both the academy and broader public contexts Sara E S Orning is Postdoctoral Fellow for “BIODIAL: The Biopolitics of Disability, Illness, and Animality,” a three-year research project funded by the Research Council of Norway
Framtidsfortellinger er tilknyttet epistemologiske, strukturelle og institusjonelle rammer. Disse... more Framtidsfortellinger er tilknyttet epistemologiske, strukturelle og institusjonelle rammer. Disse rammene setter grenser for hvordan vi kan se for oss drømmene våre for framtiden og hvem som har anledning til framtidsdrømming. Denne rundebordssamtalen analyserer rammene gjennom en dialogisk tilnaerming fra et interseksjonelt perspektiv for å undersøke dynamikkene som betinger framtidsfortellinger i vestlige samfunn.
Orning raises questions about the provocative work of Patricia Piccinini, a contemporary sculptor... more Orning raises questions about the provocative work of Patricia Piccinini, a contemporary sculptor and artist. Piccinini’s work often stages encounters between what look like human figures and what look like hybrid creatures with both human and nonhuman characteristics. Orning’s focus in these “humanimal” encounters is on the potential they hold for questioning easy distinctions between “the human” and “the animal”, while also drawing attention to the fact that human beings today can already be seen as hybrid, whether we have tissues or organs implanted from nonhuman beings or we recognize that human bodies are made up of cells and micro-organisms that are not necessarily human. Orning connects the uneasiness associated with unsettling what it means to be human to a longer genealogy of putting “monstrous” or “freakish” bodies on display, whether in the form of humans with animal-like features, or animals with human features, particularly in nineteenth-century circus sideshows. But th...
Studies and writings on the monster have a long historical trajectory, but currently we are witne... more Studies and writings on the monster have a long historical trajectory, but currently we are witnessing an unprecedented resurgence of interest in the figure of the monster. Not only has popular culture given rise to ever-increasing representations of monstrosity, but also the media and politicians are repeatedly evoking the dreaded monster through descriptions of fearful ‘foreigners’ and ‘terrorists’ who supposedly endanger our daily lives. They roam the in-between, making borders and boundaries tremble and shatter; whether these be borders of nation states or bodies, or categories of race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, self and other. Rapid technological and scientific developments make the monster rear its head: bodies are explored and modified by biotechnologies to an extent that challenges our understandings of what is human, what is animal and what is something completely different. Within the areas of communication and tele-technologies, systems and networks are developed...
In this article I investigate the embodied and multi-sensual spectator, whose film experience is ... more In this article I investigate the embodied and multi-sensual spectator, whose film experience is not dominated by the disembodied, voyeuristic distance to the screen posited as inevitable by much psychoanalytic film theory. This is a spectator who is 'making sense' of the film through eyes that hear and ears that see, and whose affective disposition allows for an experience not limited to vision as the only sense-maker. I bring into play issues of the body, embodiment, experience, and affect in order to identify possible sources of the ambiguous, bodily discomfort engendered in the spectator by Romance (Catherine Breillat, 1999) and The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001). The reactions of discomfort to these films seem to be symptomatic of a not entirely conscious rejoinder to the visual image. I suggest that such reactions indicate that the cinematic bodies touch the spectators on a bodily and psychical level, one that cannot be divided into mind and body but which must b...
According to the Swedish science fiction TV series Äkta människor (Real Humans, SVT and Matador f... more According to the Swedish science fiction TV series Äkta människor (Real Humans, SVT and Matador film 2012-2014), humanoid robots called “hubots” are replacing the human workforce in care work and assembly line industries. Against the backdrop of current debates about immigration and citizenship in the Nordic countries, this article does a close, contextual reading of the series, exploring how the hubots influence work and family life. We are particularly interested in how hubots tie in with the cultural circulation of affect in relation to Otherness and how responses towards the “not-quite” human or dehumanized Other are negotiated in present-day Nordic cultural imaginaries. What kinds of affects are at stake in how Äkta människor takes up and interacts with debates about immigrant workers and the “not-quite” human? To answer these questions, the article develops the notion of “affective imaginaries” as an analytical tool for understanding the exchange between popular culture and po...
This introduction is a promise to tell of this special issue's origins and to speak of the hopes ... more This introduction is a promise to tell of this special issue's origins and to speak of the hopes of this body of work. Even while we make this promise we know we will fail. Yet we see this failure, this gap between the promise and what remains, as precisely what the monster offers to our thinking. That is, the monster highlights the supposed divisions between the acceptable and conventional and their assumed opposites, drawing attention to the production of knowledge, including how knowledge comes to be embodied. While striving for coherence across our collective voices, so that the text may be readable for others, we want to underscore how collectives are easily rendered invisible, almost as if we are one, even while we are at least five editors of this special issue. Indeed, monstrous analyses aim to bring forth what may often be ignored, particularly the more than one in the one, the way the human is inhabited by, and made possible through, other beings on whom/which it is dependent for ongoing liveliness. In this timely Frankenstein text, we seek to make visible the patchworks and the sutures between our thinking, experiences, passions and embodied knowledges. In practice, we want to show that academic productions are labour, and in so doing we aim to use our disparate and converging voices to capture this labour, showing how ideas may start with one person but are always more than that person, in origins and what remains here. We therefore italicise when a specific idea comes from one of the editors, acknowledging their labour, while also showing
2.3. Dissection scene (c.1891) 2.4. Galerie de paléontologie et d'anatomie comparée, Paris All im... more 2.3. Dissection scene (c.1891) 2.4. Galerie de paléontologie et d'anatomie comparée, Paris All images are used according to the "fair use" clause in current copyright legislation.
This interview between Sunaura Taylor and Sara E S Orning took place digitally, over the course o... more This interview between Sunaura Taylor and Sara E S Orning took place digitally, over the course of several months in the spring of 2020, during the time that the COVID-19 pandemic exploded around the world The exchanges have been edited into the four conversations presented here, dealing with human and nonhuman life, death and vulnerability, racial and environmental justice, and extinction Sunaura Taylor is the author of Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, which won the 2018 American Book Award She is Assistant Professor of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley Her work, which argues for the need to bring animal and disability activism together, has been influential and pioneering in both the academy and broader public contexts Sara E S Orning is Postdoctoral Fellow for “BIODIAL: The Biopolitics of Disability, Illness, and Animality,” a three-year research project funded by the Research Council of Norway
Framtidsfortellinger er tilknyttet epistemologiske, strukturelle og institusjonelle rammer. Disse... more Framtidsfortellinger er tilknyttet epistemologiske, strukturelle og institusjonelle rammer. Disse rammene setter grenser for hvordan vi kan se for oss drømmene våre for framtiden og hvem som har anledning til framtidsdrømming. Denne rundebordssamtalen analyserer rammene gjennom en dialogisk tilnaerming fra et interseksjonelt perspektiv for å undersøke dynamikkene som betinger framtidsfortellinger i vestlige samfunn.
Orning raises questions about the provocative work of Patricia Piccinini, a contemporary sculptor... more Orning raises questions about the provocative work of Patricia Piccinini, a contemporary sculptor and artist. Piccinini’s work often stages encounters between what look like human figures and what look like hybrid creatures with both human and nonhuman characteristics. Orning’s focus in these “humanimal” encounters is on the potential they hold for questioning easy distinctions between “the human” and “the animal”, while also drawing attention to the fact that human beings today can already be seen as hybrid, whether we have tissues or organs implanted from nonhuman beings or we recognize that human bodies are made up of cells and micro-organisms that are not necessarily human. Orning connects the uneasiness associated with unsettling what it means to be human to a longer genealogy of putting “monstrous” or “freakish” bodies on display, whether in the form of humans with animal-like features, or animals with human features, particularly in nineteenth-century circus sideshows. But th...
Studies and writings on the monster have a long historical trajectory, but currently we are witne... more Studies and writings on the monster have a long historical trajectory, but currently we are witnessing an unprecedented resurgence of interest in the figure of the monster. Not only has popular culture given rise to ever-increasing representations of monstrosity, but also the media and politicians are repeatedly evoking the dreaded monster through descriptions of fearful ‘foreigners’ and ‘terrorists’ who supposedly endanger our daily lives. They roam the in-between, making borders and boundaries tremble and shatter; whether these be borders of nation states or bodies, or categories of race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, self and other. Rapid technological and scientific developments make the monster rear its head: bodies are explored and modified by biotechnologies to an extent that challenges our understandings of what is human, what is animal and what is something completely different. Within the areas of communication and tele-technologies, systems and networks are developed...
In this article I investigate the embodied and multi-sensual spectator, whose film experience is ... more In this article I investigate the embodied and multi-sensual spectator, whose film experience is not dominated by the disembodied, voyeuristic distance to the screen posited as inevitable by much psychoanalytic film theory. This is a spectator who is 'making sense' of the film through eyes that hear and ears that see, and whose affective disposition allows for an experience not limited to vision as the only sense-maker. I bring into play issues of the body, embodiment, experience, and affect in order to identify possible sources of the ambiguous, bodily discomfort engendered in the spectator by Romance (Catherine Breillat, 1999) and The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001). The reactions of discomfort to these films seem to be symptomatic of a not entirely conscious rejoinder to the visual image. I suggest that such reactions indicate that the cinematic bodies touch the spectators on a bodily and psychical level, one that cannot be divided into mind and body but which must b...
According to the Swedish science fiction TV series Äkta människor (Real Humans, SVT and Matador f... more According to the Swedish science fiction TV series Äkta människor (Real Humans, SVT and Matador film 2012-2014), humanoid robots called “hubots” are replacing the human workforce in care work and assembly line industries. Against the backdrop of current debates about immigration and citizenship in the Nordic countries, this article does a close, contextual reading of the series, exploring how the hubots influence work and family life. We are particularly interested in how hubots tie in with the cultural circulation of affect in relation to Otherness and how responses towards the “not-quite” human or dehumanized Other are negotiated in present-day Nordic cultural imaginaries. What kinds of affects are at stake in how Äkta människor takes up and interacts with debates about immigrant workers and the “not-quite” human? To answer these questions, the article develops the notion of “affective imaginaries” as an analytical tool for understanding the exchange between popular culture and po...
This introduction is a promise to tell of this special issue's origins and to speak of the hopes ... more This introduction is a promise to tell of this special issue's origins and to speak of the hopes of this body of work. Even while we make this promise we know we will fail. Yet we see this failure, this gap between the promise and what remains, as precisely what the monster offers to our thinking. That is, the monster highlights the supposed divisions between the acceptable and conventional and their assumed opposites, drawing attention to the production of knowledge, including how knowledge comes to be embodied. While striving for coherence across our collective voices, so that the text may be readable for others, we want to underscore how collectives are easily rendered invisible, almost as if we are one, even while we are at least five editors of this special issue. Indeed, monstrous analyses aim to bring forth what may often be ignored, particularly the more than one in the one, the way the human is inhabited by, and made possible through, other beings on whom/which it is dependent for ongoing liveliness. In this timely Frankenstein text, we seek to make visible the patchworks and the sutures between our thinking, experiences, passions and embodied knowledges. In practice, we want to show that academic productions are labour, and in so doing we aim to use our disparate and converging voices to capture this labour, showing how ideas may start with one person but are always more than that person, in origins and what remains here. We therefore italicise when a specific idea comes from one of the editors, acknowledging their labour, while also showing
2.3. Dissection scene (c.1891) 2.4. Galerie de paléontologie et d'anatomie comparée, Paris All im... more 2.3. Dissection scene (c.1891) 2.4. Galerie de paléontologie et d'anatomie comparée, Paris All images are used according to the "fair use" clause in current copyright legislation.
Uploads
Papers by Sara Orning