Thesis Advisor: Amit S. Rai 

Thesis: f e m a l e p i o n e e r : writing with and without my grandmother;

Augustus 2022

Abstract

A grandmother represented as a female pioneer, commemorated by a bronze box at a Dutch university campus. An entangled political inheritance; found in the cracks of an unattended monument; re-opened by a trace… If those that have been before remain as trace-being, transforming the relations and sensitivities in becoming today, then what would it be to “re-member” them, our ancestors? What would it be to feel their presence, secluded by absence? What would it be: to insist on the ancestry of all/our sensorial life? Within the habitat of (post-)cartesian knowledge production, those very ancestors and trace-beings are often re- (or rather dis-) membered by structures of representational containment and knowledge-without-feeling; desensitising life to life’s past; concluding history in binaries and isolated movements; disconnecting “being” from intergenerational sensation and intersectional processes of sense-making; foreclosing an authentic ability to respond. This thesis complicates some of the habits and pressures of epistemological containment, tracing into respective ontologies, tremoring additions implicated in “touch.” Touch: an entanglement of (at least) two multiplicities. What does touch bring to intersectional and anti-colonial thinking — and vice versa? This thesis focuses on embodied intersections of specifically feminist, colonial and queer inheritance, departing from a lived and certain point: skin of the author against their grandmother’s bronze. The critical urgency is a non-binary and non-innocent mode of relating. Two strategies emerge: polyrhythmic attention and representational partiality. 

Author: Lau ten Zeldam