A Femifesta for Posthuman Art Education: Visions and Becomings

Abstract

This chapter revisits my concept of ‘affective pedagogy’ (Hickey-Moody, 2009, 2012) as a posthuman model of art education. In so doing, I mobilize the manifesto/manifesta/femifesta as a genre of feminist scholarship (Colman, 2008, 2014; Haraway, 1991; Lusty, 2008; Palmer, 2015). The manifesta, or femifesta (Palmer, 2015), has provided a model for advancing a call to action in scholarship, but also in popular culture. From Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto to Riot Grrrrl and the famous revisioning of gender advanced through the Jigsaw Manifesto (Piepmeier, 2009; Lusty, 2015), the manifesto has been mobilized in various forms and contexts as a feminist modality. I modulate Deleuze’s (1998, 1990, 2003) Spinozist notion of affectus through a feminist lens as the material equation of an interaction as a means through which to map the posthuman material exchange undertaken through art. Affectus is a margin of change and the capacity to change; to be affected. This is distinct from the affection, which is the emotion and sensation felt. Working with affectus as a margin of actual and virtual change, I consider Deleuze (1990, 2003) and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987, 1996) writings on the politics of aesthetics. Affective pedagogy is a framework for thinking through the pedagogical shift in perception effected by the aesthetics of an artwork.