IMedia Manifesto Part II: Tell a Her Story: On Writing as Queer Feminist Praxis

Abstract

What can writing still do? 1 for the proponents of post-politics and post-humanism (in which post means after), writing’s time — the time of and for writing — is up. Is writing no more than a protectionist racket for the impotent I, the dreamt of and dreamt up subject of political theory now substituted by a world of objects, environments and materials as things-in-themselves? The dismissal of writing and/as critique works towards the realization of an unmediated i (meaning immediate, intuitive, intelligent …) world in which an undifferentiated citizen-consumer gestures and senses but is effectively made mute. But who speaks and writes this world that dismisses its own wording and disavows itself as a futuristic fantasy and science-fiction his story? The question of who writes (and to what end) partly answers the question of why write (and to what end). Writing works not as the realization of fantasy worlds that require a suspension of disbelief, but rather toward the unmaking and remaking of them. Its role is, as it always was, both de- and reconstructive: neither negative nor affirmative. As a queer feminist praxis, writing reverses and displaces the gendered hierarchical dualism of naturalized entities like subjects and objects (Haraway 1991). Its strategic value is that of reinvention rather than mere substitution (her story never simply replaces his) and it constitutes, as an action, in its present participle, a way out of the dialecticism that precludes the possibility of doing iworlds differently.