Preciado’s “Dysphoria Mundi” Reading Group
[acf field="date"]
Feminist Media Studio CJ Building, Room 2.130 Concordia University 7141 Sherbrooke W Montreal (Qc)
Reading group – Dysphoria Mundi by Paul B. Preciado
As part of one of the Feminist Media Studio’s new research axes, ‘Un-disciplined: trans*/queer theory and anti-disciplinarity’, we are organizing a reading group around Paul B. Preciado’s latest book, Dysphoria Mundi (Grasset, 2022). We hope to foster a space to conceptualize, develop, and employ tools of anti-disciplinarity through collective reflection, within the context of what Preciado describes as a moment of ‘historical epistemological transition’.
Preciado presents at once a philosophical treaty, a personal narrative and an analytical tool to examine this shift—a moment of transition marked by fractures, crises, and metamorphosis. This shift entails the decline of “patriarchal, sexual, and racial legitimacies” and the ‘petro-sexo-racial regime’ within capitalism. It also marks the emergence of political contestation movements who prefigure emancipatory practices and new futures. Using the Covid-19 pandemic as a metaphorical as well as analytical backdrop, his book offers a critical tool for reflecting on what he perceives as a moment of profound epistemological change. Dysphoria Mundi introduces new approaches to the application of indiscipline, recognizing the significance of “critical acts and political disobedience.” It emphasizes the need to break away from the capitalist, patriarchal, and colonial lineages through practices of inadequacy, dissent, and disidentification.
The book has not been translated to english yet. We’ve already started to produce a working translation with DeepL, so that folks who do not read french fluently are able to participate as well. Our translation will be imperfect and tentative, but those challenges might feed our collective reflections about Preciado’s work in generative and creative ways. The english version should be published in the next few months, so we might be able to have it for later meetings. For now, copies in french will be given to those who want them, and we will send our working translation to folks who need it. We should be able to share it by the end of October (p. 11-65 of the book).
The reading group will not take place at the Loyola campus. We want to find a more central location to facilitate engagement, potentially downtown at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute or at Milieux. We are hoping to hold the 1st meeting around late November / early December. We will reach out soon to interested folks about location and scheduling.
Please reach out to alexis.poiriersaumure@concordia.ca to participate or if you have any questions.
Thank you,
Lau Lefebvre, Nik Forrest and Alexis Poirier-Saumure
ABOUT THE AXIS
Un-disciplined: trans*/queer theory and anti-disciplinarity
The notion of un-disciplined, or of anti-disciplinarity, takes up the question and the critique of disciplinarity with trans*, queer, feminist, anti-racist and decolonial theories. Within this research axis, we hope to explore and foster knowledge practices that work across cuts, boundaries, barriers, and binaries, but we also want to actively resist the relentless disciplinary forces which unavoidably come to shape the knowledge and communities that we create in and through academia. In this regard, we are especially interested in asking questions that help to poke and probe at the reification and the becoming-disciplined of knowledge formations which initially came to us with the opposite political intent. How, for example, is queer theory producing a disciplined version of anti-normativity, a disciplined version of subversion and subversiveness? What are the aspects of trans* theory that bring productive challenges to queer theory’s disciplined versions? How can anti-disciplinarity help embrace messiness, both in queer and trans* studies?
Our commitment to being un-disciplined or anti-disciplinary doesn’t necessarily come with an ethos of “being against”. We also hope to explore anti-disciplinary energies and literacies which stem from desire and ‘being with’, because we remain wary of the neoliberal university’s tendency to erect boundaries between academic disciplines in order to proceed with the bureaucratic management of knowledge maintenance. In and against such formations, undercommons can be forged which are able to wield both the against and the with: perhaps that is how we can hope to practice the un-disciplined.
