Feminist Disturbance and Embodied Knowing

Note: Please find the blog post I commented on through the link to the Tumblr blog Femme Disturbance. There is not a means of commenting on posts made on this Tumblr account currently available, so I am providing my comment here on our course blog. This comment has also been e-mailed to the author Micha Cárdenas so that it is available to her as well. 

Micha,

This comment stands as both a selfish means to an end and an attempt to make possible a space for critical reflection on the labor you perform in your writing. I hope it leans more heavily on the latter (though to ignore my situated subject position as a student participating in an exercise anchored to a larger network of feminist pedagogy within “the academy,” broadly construed, would be insincere and reinstantiate the problematic fantasy that one can write, speak, act, collaborate, or create from a neutral, “unproblematic” Archimedean point in time-space), but part of performing/embodying feminist modes of “critique” is, I believe, admitting the possible failures that may or may not be created by the intervention I am making here in relation to your work.

Part of this intervention is carried out by making a space for comment-making on your writing through an alternate platform (the Feminist Dialogues on Technology blog). As I was not able to comment on your blog post directly via Femme Disturbance's Tumblr account, I have taken the liberty of remotely commenting on your work through this blog instead. I hope you will see this as a response to your note that you would “be very happy to hear...responses to these writings, comments, anything that resonates for you” in a way that opens up a site for others to participate in discussing the kind of work you do and its relationship to feminist technocultures, feminist modes of knowing/knowledge-production, and generative discourses on disturbance/rupture. As a scholar invested in reflexive embodied scholarship and performance, I found your explication of “femme disturbance” as located within a historical trajectory of “femme science” and electronic disturbance performances interesting in relation to how femme disturbance, and queer embodiment more broadly, puts into practice, or at least aims to privilege, what Haraway (1988) describes as partial knowledge. As an alternative mode of knowing that embraces the situated body, the project of partial knowledge is reimagined through femme and queer forms of embodiment (as your mixed-reality performance “Becoming Dragon” illustrates) that are co-constituted alongside and through technoscapes that include spaces of virtual reality, online gaming platforms, and more. 

Your thoughts on femme disturbance as a subject position from which to know/produce knowledge brings up interesting inquiries: How can theories of disturbance and rupture destabilize feminist epistemologies that privilege particular forms of doing scholarship that are mild-mannered rather than agitating in their style of doing research? How does failure align with notions of disturbance in online spaces? What does it mean to invite discussions on feminist modes of producing knowledge through Tumblr that are inaccessible for particular people who are not authorized to make comments on blog posts? Who/what can converse, and why? 

- Christina Aushana