Deleuze AND Guattari AND The Witch’s Broom
6-9 SEPTEMBER, UCT, CAPE TOWN
A two day conference on philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
and their relevance for work on gender and sexuality
Keynote speakers to be confirmed
Call for Papers
For Deleuze and Guattari, identities, societies, organisations, structures and so forth are always en fuite; that is, leaking or deterritorialising along lines of flight, forming new assemblages and connections and creating change through singular encounters and becomings. In this view, it is not identity and representation that are primary, but the ongoing processes of different/ciation that give rise to them. There is thus a fundamentalindetermination underlying that which we usually understand as well-determined; an endless unfolding of flows and processes beneath familiar final forms that suggests a machinic rather than transcendental or anthropocentric model of subjectivity. In this model, in other words, subjects and subjectivities are the result of immanent and material flows and processes of subjectivisation and the focus is on dynamism and relationality instead of unified being.
Importantly, Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 213) claim that “everything is political” and argue that politics precedes being. If this is the case, then in order to successfully engage with questions of gender and sexuality, we must conceive of a politics that can create different subjectivities – a politics which allows for new ways of conceptualising the immanence of being. In their joint work, A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari propose becoming-woman as one way of effectuating this politics – a deterritorialising away from conventional, normative and moralising subjectivities. They argue that “all becomings begin and pass through becoming-woman” and that it “is the key to all other becomings” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 277). However, because everything is political for Deleuze and Guattari, this does not connote a merely creative movement or undertaking. Such an understanding of becoming – and becomings-woman in particular – is not only a crude reading of their work but in fact undermines several of their core philosophical aims: to situate philosophy within the messiness of the socio-political; to describe society in its multiple macro-political and micro-political arrangements, intersecting flows, processes and resonances, overcodings, territorialisations, lines of flight, reterritorialisations and collapses; to formulate new problems and create new concepts for exploring the complexities and potentialities of the myriad machinic subjectivities of contemporary life in an ongoing process of questioning. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 248) ask us, “toward what void does the witch's broom lead?”
Keeping these threads in mind, we invite anyone interested in presenting at this, our second annual Deleuze and Guattari and Africa conference, to submit abstracts of 300-500 words for blind review to deleuzeafrica@gmail.com. Please make sure to include your affiliation (if any) and contact details in your submission, as well as any access, dietary or other requirements. We also welcome proposals for the delivery of presentations through art, performance, poetry, multimedia or any other mode of creative expression.
Some suggested topics
•
The politics of gender and sexuality
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Deleuze and Guattari and queer theory
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The politics of becoming-woman
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Identity and difference/heterogeneity
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The potentialities of subversive genders and/or sexualities
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Deleuze and Guattari and critical posthumanisms/new materialist feminisms
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Radical, revolutionary and anarcha-feminisms
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Intersections between gender, sexuality and race
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Biopower/biopolitics/societies of control
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Deleuze and Guattari and the life sciences – queering biology
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Body modification and transgressive sexualities
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Critical engagement with rights discourses, policies and programs responding to LGBTQI persons and related issues
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LGBTQI subjectivisation, subjectivities and subject-formation
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Identity categories as instruments of regulatory regimes
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Affect in feminist, queer and gender-related methodologies
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Transgenderedness and non-binary becomings
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Liminal genders and sexualities
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Minor literatures responding to these or related topics
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We welcome proposals on other topics broadly related to our theme
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