Organised with support from the Gender and Identities Research Theme, Loughborough University.

Through film, a reading and conversation this event will explore, unpick and reconfigure the entanglements between nature, labour and gender. Taking as its starting point the contention that there is nothing ‘natural’ about nature, it will consider how nature and gender are produced by narrative, labour and struggle. Crucially, it will consider how this might be done differently: how we can tell stories that are richly ecological but deeply technological; and how these alternative ecological understandings pose opportunities and problems for remaking our world. Questioning forms and processes that might seem entirely ‘natural’—the family, pregnancy, the lives of insects, the working day, gender identities, the forest—it will expand the horizons of both the natural and the possible.

The event will open with a screening of Amy Cutler’s short film All Her Beautiful Green Remains In Tears. This consists of re-edited footage from Walt Disney's Nature's Half Acre (1951), with its sexist parables about domesticated post-war suburbia: nest building, chick rearing, mother love, industrious insects, and traditional gender roles. In this case, the new voiceover - replacing the paternal voice of Winston Hibler - also focuses on romantic anthropomorphism. The difference is that this voiceover has been generated by a neural network in collaboration with data artist Anna Ridler, using an A.I. which has learned its existence entirely from reading the female protagonist voice in 14 million passages of romance novels. Using image recognition and closed captioning, it tells an entirely different story of the “birds and the bees” of nature documentary: one of female desire, trauma, masochism, and emotional fantasy. The film is soundtracked by the musician Leafcutter John, who specialises in creating natural landscapes and ecologies from generated noise, often using DIY gadgets.

Following this, Sophie Lewis will read a new piece expanding on themes presented in her book, Full Surrogacy Now (Verso, 2019). She’ll consider the politics of water and the ‘bio-bag,’ in which scientists are “automatically gestating” sheep foetuses. Drawing on and critiquing the mind-expanding and world-building feminisms of thinkers such as Shulamith Firestone, Maggie Nelson and Marge Piercy, Lewis will consider what such automation poses for struggles against the tyranny of work, and how water might be a common feature of seemingly disparate political and ecological struggles. Lewis and Cutler will then have a conversation interrogating each others’ work, which will be opened up for questions from the audience.

Amy Cutler is an artist, cultural geographer, curator, writer, and film-maker who works with ideas of geography and nonhuman others. She has exhibited her work or run live events with organisations including the BBC, Somerset House, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Sheffield Institute of Arts, the Wellcome Trust, the Horniman Museum, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, Late Junction, Tate Modern, the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, the Horse Hospital, the Natural History Museum, and Kew Museum of Economic Botany. Her geography training impacts her work as an artist, performer, and curator, and she works frequently on the production of immersive and live cinema and exhibition events provoking and changing the public conversation around ideas of space, geography, and nature-cultures. She currently lectures in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Sophie Lewis is a writer, translator and feminist geographer living in Philadelphia. Her book Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family is published by Verso on the 7th May. It considers the political struggles of surrogates, arguing that an increase in their rights could result in challenging assumptions that children necessarily belong to those whose genetics they share. This, in turn, opens up space for taking collective responsibility for children and the radical transformation of notions of kinship. Donna Haraway has labelled it “the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for”, whilst McKenzie Wark says that it “brings us a vision of another life”. In addition to this, Lewis has translated works including Communism for Kids by Bini Adamczak (MIT, 2016) and A Brief History of Feminism by Antje Schupp (MIT, 2017). She is a member of the Out of the Woods collective, whose first book is to be published by Common Notions in 2019, an editor at Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry, and a queer feminist committed to cyborg ecology and anti-fascism. Further writings, on subjects ranging from Donna Haraway to dating, have been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, Viewpoint Magazine, Signs, Dialogues in Human Geography, Antipode, Feminism & Psychology, Science as Culture, Frontiers, The New Inquiry, Jacobin, Mute and Salvage Quarterly.

Accessibility: The room is situated on the first floor of Martin Hall, which has an accessible lift. Speakers will be given microphones, and a microphone will be used for audience questions. The film does not have subtitles, but please email d.m.bell@lboro.ac.uk if you would like a transcript of the voiceover. There are male, female and accessible gender neutral toilets in Martin Hall. If you have any other needs or questions please email d.m.bell@lboro.ac.uk.