Gender as Affect: A cross-cultural aesthetics of gender
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
4:00 pm
- Venue
- Online (Zoom)
About this event
This talk will bring together Japanese Aesthetics and American Pragmatism to demonstrate gender as an affective quality that emerges from the integration of embodied habits.
To do so, this talk will rely on Motoori Norinaga’s aesthetic theory of Mono no Aware and Shannon Sullivan’s feminist re-reading of John Dewey to more clearly present gender as affect through the creative process of embodying gender. For Norinaga, aware, or the “moving power of things,” is the affective quality of an object that, in part determines what the object is.
Within Norinaga’s aesthetics, everything in the world had an aware, including social positions and gender roles. Put simply, to articulate gender was not merely a matter of physicality, but of the appropriate affective articulation. Similarly, Shannon Sullivan argues in her feminist reinterpretation of John Dewey, that the character of an individual disclosed through Dewey’s integration of cultural habits does so in the mode of gender. Insofar as gender, for Dewey, was a quality of an individual enacted through habit, bringing Dewey together with Norinaga thereby can make possible a cross-cultural Aesthetics of Gender not tied to biology, but intimately connected to identity as a creative process.
About the speaker
Johnathan Flowers is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Northridge. His research areas include African American intellectual history, Japanese Aesthetics, American Pragmatism, Philosophy of Disability, and Philosophy of Technology.
Jonathan also works in the areas of Science and Technology Studies and Comics Studies, where he applies insights from American Pragmatism, Philosophy of Race, and Disability Studies to current issues in human/computer interaction, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and representations of identity in popular culture. His first monograph, Mono no Aware as a Poetics of Gender was published through Lexington Books in 2023.
Further details
This event is online via via Zoom.
