Vráblíková, Lenka and Mitchell, Elspeth. 2023. 'What Myco-futures? Mycorrhizal Encounters against racist cis-heteropatriarchy'. In: Democracies in Flux: LGBTI= struggles, feminist politics, and anti-gender contestations. Campus Condorcet, Paris, France 29 - 30 June 2023. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Abstract or Description

What can practitioners of transnational feminisms learn from encounters with the extraordinary, yet to modern science largely unknown, organisms we call fungi? Fungi’s diverse ecology, queer biology and striking biodiversity offer ways of imagining new relationships to difference, as well as proposing decentred models for self-organizing and liberatory forms of collective action (Bahng, 2017). Faced with the anthropogenic climate catastrophe, fungi have also been called upon to ‘save the world’ (Stamets, 2005), often forming part of narratives of human-planet relations and their future. However, while capturing attention anew, the historical and geo-politically situated meanings of fungi and their significance to feminist, anti-racist and decolonising efforts are less thought through, particularly in anglophone cultures and discourses. In addition, the liberatory potential of fungi as matter and metaphor requires further reflection as complex forms of radical emergence risk becoming neo-colonisation and fungi are made to bear the burden of human salvation. Working through such complexities of contemporary socio-cultural and environmental politics, the talk explores the role fungi have played in the cultural imagination of European cis-heteropatriarchal postcoloniality and introduces the concept and practice of mycorrhizal encounters as a response. Following the traces that fungi and their metaphors leave in the articulation of national identity, race, gender and sexuality, the talk attempts to envision new forms of belonging, embodiment and transformation.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Keynote)
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Art
Dates:	Date Event 30 June 2023 Completed
Event Location:	Campus Condorcet, Paris, France
Date range:	29 - 30 June 2023
Item ID:	35762
Date Deposited:	26 Mar 2024 09:46
Last Modified:	26 Mar 2024 09:46
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/35762

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