Arrate Hidalgo | Tohu Magazine Conference
Channel: Tohu Magazine
Date: 2017-05-23

Tohu Magazine conference | Space is the Place:
Afrofuturism, Arabfuturism and the Search for New Dimensions

26 April, 2017 | Basis Art School, Herzlyia

An international conference surveying Afrofuturistic and Arabfuturistic expressions and looking into the possibilities of ethnofuturistic thought in Middle Eastern art and culture.

Arrate Hidalgo | Speculative Queerness: How Science Fiction Ruined my Relationship with the Gender Binary

Before Judith Butler’s gender performativity, before Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, way before all social media were bursting with genderqueer and trans awareness, speculative fiction sent Arrate Hidalgo on a one-way trip to the universe of the gender grayscale. We will explore literary and visual manifestations of sci-fi and fantasy, including 1990s anime classics, Second-Wave feminist utopias, afrofuturist music videos, and Pokemon-inspired memes, to discover how non-realistic fiction is expanding our notion of gender and possibly shaping what non-binary might look like in meatspace.
 
Arrate Hidalgo builds bridges between speculative, feminist, and queer fiction written in Spanish and English. She is a translator and associate editor at the independent US publisher Aqueduct Press. Her poems, fiction and nonfiction are featured in several zines, journals, and books. She lives in Bilbao and Madrid.

Introduction by Lama Suleiman, co-organizer of the conference and a contributor for Tohu Magazine