The Centre for Global and Comparative Philosophies is very pleased to invite you to the 21^st Lecture in the SOAS World Philosophies Lecture Series.  The Lecture will be delivered by Johnathan Flowers, Assistant Professor of  Philosophy, California State University, Northridge

Title:

Gender as Affect: a Cross-Cultural Aesthetics of Gender

Summary

This talk will bring together Japanese Aesthetics and American Pragmatism to demonstrate gender as an affective quality that emerges from the integration of embodied habits. To do so, this talk will rely on Motoori Norinaga’s aesthetic theory of Mono no Aware and Shannon Sullivan’s feminist re-reading of John Dewey to more clearly present gender as affect through the creative process of embodying gender. For Norinaga, aware, or the “moving power of things,” is the affective quality of an object that, in part determines what the object is. Within Norinaga’s aesthetics, everything in the world had an aware, including social positions and gender roles. Put simply, to articulate gender was not merely a matter of physicality, but of the appropriate affective articulation. Similarly, Shannon Sullivan argues in her feminist reinterpretation of John Dewey, that the character of an individual disclosed through Dewey’s integration of cultural habits does so in the mode of gender. Insofar as gender, for Dewey, was a quality of an individual enacted through habit, bringing Dewey together with Norinaga thereby can make possible a cross-cultural Aesthetics of Gender not tied to biology, but intimately connected to identity as a creative process.

Date:

Friday, March 22, 2024

Time:

16:00 (UK Time)

Place:

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Speaker’s bio:

Johnathan Flowers is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Northridge. Flowers’s research areas include African American intellectual history, Japanese Aesthetics, American Pragmatism, Philosophy of Disability, and Philosophy of Technology. Flowers also works in the areas of Science and Technology Studies and Comics Studies, where he applies insights from American Pragmatism, Philosophy of Race, and Disability Studies to current issues in human/computer interaction, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and representations of identity in popular culture. His first monograph, Mono no Aware as a Poetics of Gender was published through Lexington Books in 2023.