Writing New Bodies

In her keynote lecture “‘These Waves …’: Writing New Bodies for Applied E-literature Studies”, Prof. Astrid Ensslin called Ne me touchez pas / Don’t touch me” (2003) a work of Agency Art- yess! thanks!

ELO2019, University College Cork, July 17, 2019.

https://youtu.be/nobZYl3NwRY (17:50 – 20:20)

She also humoristically pointed to e-lit’s tendency to create overlapping, opposing, confusing generation categories and talked about gazes – male, white, colonial, medical, thin-bodied, female, voyeuristic, ergodic: “a … forcefully enacted gaze which”…”physically enacts the gaze of the beholder” to end up presenting the Writing New Bodies project.

In her talk Prof Ensslin reassesed the social and psychological possibilities of e-lit research and practice by riding a new wave of applied, interventionist e-lit scholarship. She reports on the methods and early findings of the “Writing New Bodies” project, which aims to develop a digital fiction for a new form of contemporary, digital-born bibliotherapy. In following the principles of critical community codesign and feminist participatory action research, WNB engages young women ages 18-25 in envisioning worlds where they feel at home in their bodies.

Filed under: Of interest, Agency Art, Astrid Ennslin, bodies, Don't touch me, e-lit, e-literature, ergodic gaze, feminism