PARALLEL SESSIONS 1 1A Performing mobilities – Exteriorities, storyscapes, temporalities, and the movements of faith Stuart Grant Being-moved-by/Giving-over-to/Performing-from This paper details a performance method which aims to prepare the performer to be sensitised to being performed by exteriorities – environments, relations, objects, atmospheres, others. The methodology is based in Bodyweather and Butoh techniques, informed by and understood through Heidegger’s idea of “the Turning” and Levinas’ “passivity more passive than the most passive passivity”. The ultimate aim is preparation for the abdication of agency over to the cause of finding ways of inhabiting the earth which are determined by the belonging-to, immersion-in and emergence-of the body from that earth. The presentation includes an invitation for audience members to participate in demonstrations of concrete techniques which achieve a radical reorientation of the body in its relation to exteriorities. Misha Myers Storyscaping transnational places through complex media environments This presentation explores how forms of spatial storytelling mediated by networked and/or portable technologies may create new engagements with places marked by transnational mobility and displacement. Works such as National Theatre Wales’ Border Game, Stalker’s Primavera Roma, Visser, Rothuizen and van Tol’s Refugee Republic, or the author’s way from home, use multiple media platforms to both map and facilitate orientations to and representations of place by transporting audiences, physically and/or imaginatively, between disparate and hybrid digital and physical experiences. This presentation will consider how contradictory claims, desires and memories co-exist and are negotiated in these creative interstitial spaces. Stacy Holman Jones Waiting for queer: Performing temporalities in/through the not-yet-queer family This paper takes up the notion of the delayed performative of queer mothering through the lens of adoption. With a particular focus on the enactment of queer futurity in/through performances of waiting – the anxious waiting for “the call” bearing news of a child that adoptive mothers do, and the insistent waiting for the possibility of another world that mothering promises, this paper performs queer mothering as a “doing for and toward the future” (Munoz, 2009, p. 1). The paper draws on Halberstam’s (2005) concepts of “family time” – the heteronormative reproduction of “family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” – and “queer time” (p. 6) – non-normative modes of embodiment and relationality that emerge once we leave these temporal frames behind. Queer family time and queer futurity rely on waiting as the “relational and collective modality of endurance and support” (Munoz p. 91). Like adoption, the delayed performative of the not-yet queer family is an anticipatory and delayed enactment of intimate relationships as a braiding together hope and affect (Munoz p. 46). 1B Decolonising the Mind: Racism, moral imagination and white ambush The three speakers in this panel will begin with a discussion of critical whiteness as an approach of hegemonial self-reflection, go on to imagining whiteness in terms of a moral imagination before unpicking the idea of white ambush. Martina Tissberger In white dominance cultures, racism rests on a collective denial to acknowledge the creation of wealth by white people and societies through the exploitation of non-white peoples: historically by means of slavery and colonialism and through their contemporary expressions in contemporary societies. The ideology of racial superiority continues to be pervasive even though anti-racist policies contradict idealistic self-conceptions − in terms of human rights, democracy, freedom, and equality − within Western societies. The terrain of the unconscious, therefore, offers room for the sedimentation of a suppressed history of purposeful exploitation; a contradiction that manifests itself in people´s affects and uncertainties, both collectively and individually. Hence deconstructing the concept of whiteness as the signifier of racism”s hegemonic order − and in turn, of decolonizing the mind − is fundamental. Audrey Fernandes-Satar The work of Franz Fanon (1963) is useful in exploring the notion of whiteness as symbolic violence and a moral imagination that have permeated the post-colonial imagination. From the perspective of a woman of colour, the experience of whiteness represents metaphoric violence that is internalised in a space where there is no reasoning, but only past experiences to deal with the present situation. Through a critical standpoint theorising, this presentation will examine how whiteness has been conceptualised and becomes reasonable, through an investigating of the role of moral imagination (Johnson, 1997) in its conjecture. Nado Aveling Given that dismantling racial identities – whether Black or White − is a continuous project that always requires a dismantling of white privilege, disrupting whiteness is not confined to antiracist beliefs; it is not enough to proclaim oneself antiracist because our white bodies are replete with racist habits even as our white selves earnestly wish to disrupt those habits. Inhabiting gendered and “raced” bodies we take pride in being effective social justice practitioners but even as we understand that rather than being non-racist, at best, we can only ever be antiracist-racists. Hence efforts to relinquish white power are always incomplete. If, indeed, antiracism “involves a continual choice, though one often filled with tensions, contradictions and ambushes” (Yancy, 2008, p. 229) this final presentation disentangles the idea of the “white ambush”: what it looks like, how it is experienced and what might be learned from being ambushed. 1C Mediated Intimacies: Bodies, Relationships, Technologies (Chair: Sarah Baker) Alison Winch Mediated Intimacies: Bodies, Relationships, Technologies This paper reflects on the key themes that have emerged from the special issue of Journal of Gender Studies (forthcoming 2017) that this panel is co-editing on “Mediated Intimacies: bodies, relationships, technologies”. The special issue investigates the ways that a media convergence culture represents, intervenes in, exploits and enables intimate relations. In particular it looks at the various ways that intimacy is being reconfigured in response to the specific historical conditions of the neoliberal conjuncture. On the one hand we are living in atomized and individualistic times where relationships are increasingly strategic and competitive. On the other the media has become, as Beverly Skeggs argues, intensely intimate. This paper interrogates the concept of mediated intimacies. What are the different configurations of intimacy possible in the neoliberal conjuncture? Are they different from what went on before? Is the notion of intimacy changing according to the affordances of different technologies? Are there new concepts of intimacy emerging? Are some forms of intimacy enabled and others constrained by the multiplicity of platforms that offer opportunities for connections with others as well as with oneself? Misha Kavka* & Rachel Berryman* “I Guess A Lot of People See Me as a Big Sister or a Friend”: The Role of Intimacy in the Celebrification of Beauty Vloggers With an impressive eleven million subscribers, Zoe “Zoella” Sugg is among the most popular of the young adults who have recently obtained fame (and fortune) by posting videos to YouTube. She figures prominently in the beauty group, one of the fastest-growing and most overtly feminised subsets of the YouTube community, creating videos on lifestyle, fashion and beauty-related topics. However, to a greater extent than many of her peers, Sugg supports her product-oriented videos with vlogs that offer behind-the-scenes, intimate access to her life(style). In so doing, Zoe”s videos encourage intimacy not simply between her viewers and the “big sister” persona she adopts on-screen, but also between her audience and the commodities she associates herself with. This article argues that the success of the YouTube “influencer” economy, both in terms of its gender predispositions and celebrity effects, depends on processes of commodification through intimacy, which Zoe Sugg mobilises in exemplary fashion. Jamie Hakim Chemsex and the city: queering intimacy in neoliberal London Since 2011, chemsex has been on the rise in London amongst men who have sex with men (MSM) (Bourne et al., 2015). The term chemsex refers to the use of one or a combination of recreational drugs (GHB/GBL, mephedrone and crystal methamphetamine) to facilitate sexual sessions, often in groups, that can last hours or days. This paper attempts to account for this rise. It does this by contesting the prevailing view advanced by sexual health experts that the rise of chemsex can be located in the hook-up app use of vulnerable gay men who have problems with sex and intimacy. To counter this technologically deterministic view of MSM digital media use, this paper performs a conjunctural analysis (Grossberg, 2010) to argue that this form of mediated intimacy has risen in popularity as a result of the material effects of neoliberal austerity on London’s gay scene since 2008. It concludes by arguing that chemsex is an intense, albeit transient, way for MSM to form collective bonds within historical conditions in which neoliberalism’s insistence on autonomous, competitive individualism makes any formation of collectivity as difficult as possible