PRESENTATION: A FUGITIVE’S FEMINISM: THINKING WITHOUT THE HUMAN

How do we think about politics, solidarity and community without the framework of the human? How might we think about ourselves, our social relations and the world around us without the organising principle of humanity? What do we lose – but also, crucially, what new possibilities are created – when we reject the human? In this talk, sociologist and writer Akwugo Emejulu will explore what it means to take seriously Black women’s non-belonging in the category of the human and the grief, danger and pleasure that this non-belonging makes possible. To shrug off the restrictions of gender, of race, of class and to step into the unknown as a fugitive is utopian and perhaps there is no-place where the fugitive is at home. But what if the utopian is found in our everyday social relations with fellow fugitives? What if a different kind of feminist politics can be built by embracing the ambivalent, the liminal and the precarious?