AAANZ Conference 2023
Full Paper will be uploaded here as a link to academia.au
Misrecognition and {I} Posthumanism, Ecofeminism and the Bodily Ego
ABSTRACT
This artistic project expounds on my prior PhD research Performing the Transformative that questions why menopause is not defined in Western society as a natural process of transformation that has the potential to result in empowerment for the individual woman. This new project is a series of personal recorded rituals employed to reveal a transformation of the ‘I’ and the bodily ego through the tripartite process of separation, transition and reincorporation as evident in a rite of passage. These rituals are performed in nature employing my own body and point to the ecofeminist view that women and nature are inextricably linked while referring to posthumanism that seeks to encourage thinking outside of our self-interest, the ‘I’. The project implies that patriarchal constructs imposed upon women are associated with the ‘I’ that is the distinction between the conscious ego which forms the I of the self, and the unconscious of the subject—amounts to a “misrecognition” (méconnaissance).[1]
[1] Kirsten Campbell, Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistomology (London: Routledge, 2004), 32.
2021
“There seems to be a release from the old imperatives of dominance and power, of competitive appearance and performance, of self abnegation and manipulation, of conformity and mask, of illusion and self deceit.”
Betty Friedan
The Fountain of Age, p.132 1993
Interestingly I read Friedans’s book for the first time post PhD. It was given to me by my first supervisor who retired at the beginning of my PhD journey – thank you Dr Petelin. I had little time to read it back then as my direction moved toward feminist psychoanalysis. Friedan’s book is relevant today as it was in 1993. A classic.
