Online discussion with Elena Comay del Junco, Siobhan F. Guerrero Mc Manus, John Paul Ricco, and Miguel Ventura, moderated by Irmgard Emmelhainz

Join us on Tuesday, July 20, 2021, at 1pm EST for an online discussion with Elena Comay del Junco, Siobhan F. Guerrero Mc Manus, John Paul Ricco, and Miguel Ventura, moderated by Irmgard Emmelhainz.

Endocrine disruptors polluting our environment are altering reproduction and the sexual morphology of organisms, challenging heteronormative understandings of sexed biologies, and attesting to the fact that bodies are constituted in symbiosis with the environment through processes, relations, adaptations, metabolisms. This metamorphosis threatening fertility is triggering cultural nerves and anxieties about heteronormative essentialisms, again. One way queer theory has dealt with these essentialisms has been through dismantling the hermeneutics surrounding gender, sexuality, and identity, towards illegibility and the blurring or resignification of sexuality and binary roles. Trans theory, on the other hand, has sought to give back the specificity and difference of the gender/sex binary beyond the sovereign hierarchies of being commanded by God and prescribed by nature (McKenzie Wark). If queer theory is about contesting oppressive heteronormativity by creating peripheral forms of being, sexuality, and identities beyond the socially accepted norms, trans theory is about becomings, potential, desire, and transformation beyond the dominant metaphysical order. Queer and trans people have long been perceived as harbingers of civilizational collapse, while simultaneously pointing the way out of, or through it. However, as current junctions in theory and experience suggest, the two positions may be pursuing, or in need of pursuing, different paths. Will they meet at the exit?

The discussion accompanies the films in “Gendering, Disgendering, Transgendering,” the second program of the series Me, You, and Everyone We Know: Interrelationality, Alterity, Globalization, curated by Irmgard Emmelhainz for e-flux Video & Film.

Watch the films here, and read more about the series here.

Elena Comay del Junco is a writer and assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. Her research spans ancient philosophy and contemporary social and political thought, particularly questions of race and racism. She is currently working on a book about the concept of “nature” and a collection of essays about the vicissitudes of gender and race in art, literature, and politics.

Siobhan F. Guerrero Mc Manus studied biology at the School of Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and holds a PhD in Philosophy of Science also from UNAM. She is currently Associate Professor at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Sciences and Humanities (CEIICH-UNAM). She is also a member of the Editorial Committee of the journal Debate Feminista. Her areas of specialty are (i) science and gender studies, (ii) philosophy of biology, (iii) transfeminism, and (iv) philosophy and subjectivity. She is Level II at the Mexican National System of Researchers. In 2018 she received the National University Distinction Award for Young Academics, and in 2020, the Research Award in the area of humanities awarded by the Mexican Academy of Sciences.

John Paul Ricco is an art historian and queer theorist, currently working on queer sexuality and solitude, extinction aesthetics, and the erotic aisthesis of the common. His first book, The Logic of the Lure (2002), was the first published monograph in queer theoretical art history. He is also the author of The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes (2014); the co-editor of a new issue of Parallax on Jean-Luc Nancy and Exscription; and a contributor to Capitalism and the Camera (Verso, 2021). He teaches at the University of Toronto.

Miguel Ventura (b. 1954, San Antonio, Texas) has been living and working in Mexico City since 1977. He has developed a body of work creating a new world with its own races and languages: NILC (New Inter-Territorial Language Committee). His atypical social model is presented through a series of video installations, objects, music, paintings, and drawings—employing parody and ridicule in order to label everyday patterns of societal behavior. His earlier work referred to notions of innocence, sexuality, and masculinity. In recent years, Ventura has reinterpreted symbols of the past—such as the swastika—in order to discuss current practices in the neoliberal world of finance, government, and art. His solo exhibitions include Oratorio de Arte Contemporáneo Neoliberal at the museum of the city of Queretaro (2011); Cantos Cívicos, un proyecto de NILC en colaboración con Miguel Ventura at the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC), Mexico City (2008) and at the Espai d’art contemporani de Castelló, Castellon, Spain (2007); Como he amarte mi pequeñín? at El Ojo Atómico, Madrid (2005); The P.M.S. Dilemma at Carrillo Gil Art Museum, Mexico City (2002); and The New Fuck Me Little Daddy House at Museum of Mexico City, Flatland Gallery, and Impakt Festival in Utrecht (1999).

Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent translator, writer, researcher, and lecturer based in Mexico City. Her book Jean-Luc Godard’s Political Filmmaking was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2019. The translated expanded version of The Tyranny of Common Sense: Mexico’s Neoliberal Conversion is coming out this fall with SUNY Press, and so is Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures: Feminist Lives as Resistance (Vanderbilt). She is a member of the SNCA in Mexico (National System for Arts Creators).

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.