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BiGS Event: Our Lady of Flowers - Francisco Camacho dancing to Judith Butler: Towards an eccentric Genealogy of Gender

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Venue: Birkbeck 28 Russell Square

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Our Lady of Flowers - Francisco Camacho Dancing to Judith Butler: Towards an Eccentric Genealogy of Gender
Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality

Free event open to all: Book your place

Speaker: Dr. João Manuel de Oliveira, Instituto UniversitÃrio de Lisboa, Portugal

This talk fosters a genealogy of gender that refuses and resists its dominant historiographies. It aims to rethink shifting theories of gender, deploying Foucauldian notions of genealogy, but from the borders of southern Europe partially outside the imperialist centres of knowledge production. Following Walter Benjamin, the slant of the victorious appears in certain depictions of the triumphant history of the concept of gender. I want to trouble these naratives of gender further, offering a critique of their exclusive focus on academic work, re-reading and re-figuring this historiography in Portugal.

Looking at gender, not as a unitary concept, but as a rhizome marked by deterritorializations and reterritorializations (Oliveira, 2016), uncanny archives of gender emerge, which haunt us in unexpected ways. Tracing this (eccentric) genealogy in the Portuguese case, I follow the emergence of a concept of gender marked by Butlerian performativity. I see this especially in the work of Francisco Camacho, Nossa Senhora das Flores/Our Lady of Flowers, a contemporary dance piece from the wave of New Portuguese Dance in the 90's. In Portugal, prior to any academic uses of the concept, gender performativity was already being staged, allowing me to analyse encounters between theory/praxis and contemporary dance. We could even say that gender in Portugal was danced first, and then (academically) thought later, parodying Vera Mantero's dance piece: Perhaps she could dance first and think afterwards (1991). I thus propose an uncanny gender subversion that transits and dances.

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