Goldsmiths, University of London

Faculty Member, Visual Cultures

Lecturer in Visual Cultures

About

Like you, I am multi-tasking.  My 'Animal Transference' has just come out with Mosaic, and is morphing into a new essay on 'Animal Melancholia'. I've completed stage 1 of sorting out Zizek's  wilful misreading of Derrida, mollified by seguing into some more of Cornelia Vismann's work on legal media and that courtroom scene in Dancer in the Dark, sometime soon stage 2, Dolar as the diplomatic face of Zizek will have to be dissected. I am always reading The Postcard.

My book _Machine-Events: autobiographies of the performative_ is almost complete. There I argue that performativity not only crosses organic and synthetic but troubles the discourse of species. The book makes major interventions into relations between feminism, deconstruction, animal studies and visual culture through closely read cinematic case studies.

My long-standing interest in feminist investigations into gender, sexuality and sexual difference together with their material exploration in visual culture - and aural culture, has been enriched over the last few years through connecting with the 'animal question'.  Who we are, and who we are following (in Derrida's locution), have become yet more sharply focused questions when taken together with who we call kin and whom we eat. 

Consequently, I am editing a volume of essays called _Hedgehogs & Silkworms: Following Animals in Deconstruction_ and  co-editing, with Lindsay Kelley, a future issue of parallax called 'bon appetit,' both for publication in 2013.

Having survived - and practiced - the harsh tones of 1980's/1990's critical art practices and art schools (though perhaps always with an eye for, say, lighting lending a supplement of seduction that ideological critique otherwise aimed to smash), I find myself more interested in art now than for years. This is impacting on my 3rd year elective 'sexual poetics' and its new M-level version 'sex, gender, species' with some pleasure and conviviality. It's also germinating new essays on work by artists such as Roni Horn, Julia Reodica and Dorothy Cross, films such as Dean Spanley and Dancer in the Dark, and novels such as Geoff Ryman's Lust.

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