Jose Esteban Muñoz described “disidentification” as a way of reading that “scrambles” the intended meanings of a given text, exposing its racialized, classed, gendered, and hegemonic limitations of scope while also enabling alternative forms of representation and meaning-making. For Muñoz, disidentification transforms the encoded meanings of a given text into the “raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture” (31). Working in the spirit of this intervention and hybridizing it with an ecocritical approach to the human, this panel seeks presentations that “disidentify with the human.” Drawing upon (eco)feminist, queer, decolonial, new materialist, and critical-race approaches to animal studies and the environment, this panel will explore the limits of a human-centered worldview while also attending to the intersections of identity, society, dispossession, speciesism, ability, and/or racialized capitalism. Projects of interest could model disidentification with the human along various axes:

• Through creative and analytical explorations of other-than-human life.
• Through engagement with genealogies of the human that have excluded nonwhite, indigenous, queer, disabled, and otherwise marginalized individuals by framing them as not-fully-human, inhuman, parahuman, etc.
• Through activist postures of more-than-human alliance and environmental justice.
• Through practices of radical empathy across species.
• Through re-imaginings of kinship and embodiment that hybridize-with or extend-beyond the human.
• And through narratives of trans- or post-humanity.

Though this panel takes the format of a traditional 4-human panel, it is particularly interested in creative, hybrid, and nontraditional approaches to knowledge production, including but not limited to performance art, film, poetry, and other forms of artistic expression.

Panel Organizers:  Lindsay Garcia ([email protected]), College of William and Mary, and Daniel Lanza Rivers ([email protected]), Miami University

Planned Format:  Traditional Panel (4 Presenters)