Faculty Research Fellows Zoom Talk with Shane Denson

Shane Denson:  "Gender, Seriality, and Mediality"

In his late, Marxist-oriented work The Critique of Dialectical Reason, Jean-Paul Sartre described the anonymous collectives characteristic of urban modernity as “serialities,” thus positing a material connection between the serial production processes of industrial capitalism and the modes of comportment between mutually alienated subjects. Taking up Sartre’s concept for specifically feminist ends, philosopher Iris Marion Young takes seriality as the basis for rethinking gender beyond questions of identity, discourse, or even biology, rooting it instead in embodied and collective interactions with the materiality of the lifeworld and its objects. This presentation expands on these reflections to account for the role of media, as both representational and material forces, in the ongoing modulation of gender and its politics.

Shane Denson is Associate Professor of Art & Art History