Dr Shehnaz Suterwalla | Royal College of Art (original) (raw)
Conference Presentations by Dr Shehnaz Suterwalla
The design of technology, the internet and digital life in how we live now has proved fertile gro... more The design of technology, the internet and digital life in how we live now has proved fertile ground for technofeminist and cyberfeminist debates over the last twenty years. While women’s identities have been reconfigured with the digital, the politics of experience and representation have also evolved to expose unsettling gender power relations as digital artefacts and people co-evolve. In this way the design and materiality of technology has revealed its darker sides. Despite the backdrop of the imagined utopias that formed the cybernetic and cyborg rhetoric of the 1960s, digital life for women now includes dystopic elements of discrimination, exclusion, objectification. This paper pits these dystopic realties against digital life’s utopianism. With a renewed emphasis on materiality and embodiment; it presents a conceptual and methodological discussion of ways of incorporating the body and emotional and sensorial practices into digital debates, and in this way it develops too a discussion on how we might live.
This paper explores the way in which the material process of head veiling (hijab) in London corre... more This paper explores the way in which the material process of head veiling (hijab) in London corresponds with embodied and philosophical notions of new postcolonial subjective identities. Since 2000 in Britain, there has been a rapid increase in the popularity of veiling for Muslim women, with many young Muslims choosing to adopt the headscarf voluntarily. Within the context of postcolonial histories, politics and legacies, tans-cultural flows and local trends, I discuss how dress objects and materials are manipulated into ‘hijab’ to create innovative ensembles to reflect diasporic lived realties. The paper analyses how veiling in this context forms part of a narrative of cultural postcolonialism, based on conceptions of Otherness as Britishness, within contemporary Muslim youth styles.
The emphasis in this paper is on strategies of appropriation, bricolage and hybridity. Within this matrix I examine folding, pulling and tucking as techniques of postcolonial recontextualisation that morph high street objects into performative and dynamic signs and symbols. My analysis throws into crisis static definitions of materials; instead my interrogation pivots around how materials undergo a process of metamorphosis through embodiment, and the ways in which these processes dismantle essential or totalising narratives. The paper presents a discussion of the negotiation of fabric and cloth as a means to understand expressions of postcolonial embodied, temporal and spatial values and aesthetics.
Symposia by Dr Shehnaz Suterwalla
Featuring interactive performance lectures, screenings and debate, this dynamic half-day symposiu... more Featuring interactive performance lectures, screenings and debate, this dynamic half-day symposium examines the integration of the digital in the construction of the ‘self’, asking how this has complicated our experience of material reality. With the merging of the ‘real’ with the virtual on and off-line, ‘play’ with the creation of multiple ‘selves’ is now commonplace. This offers limitless opportunities for impersonation, deception and fakery; useful tools for political counter-strategies, but also the roots for anxieties regarding loss of control over issues of ‘real’ identity. So what are the implications for the material realities of the body in the mangled and mutable unreal ‘real’ of the virtual, digital realm?
Featuring presentations from Dr Shehnaz Suterwalla, Noam Toran, Onkar Kular, Ben Dalton and Leslie Kulesh, participants use the term ‘authenticity’ as a prism through which to explore and challenge questions regarding impersonation, politics and gendered resistance, addressing the question of whether the faked, forged, inauthentic multitude-identities afforded by the digital era are a cause for panic, or a point of potential?
Authenticity & ‘Real’? Bodies is presented in collaboration with Shehnaz Suterwalla and the Royal College of Art, London
Talks by Dr Shehnaz Suterwalla
Books by Dr Shehnaz Suterwalla
Journal Articles by Dr Shehnaz Suterwalla
RCA Show by Dr Shehnaz Suterwalla
Papers by Dr Shehnaz Suterwalla
The design of technology, the internet and digital life in how we live now has proved fertile gro... more The design of technology, the internet and digital life in how we live now has proved fertile ground for technofeminist and cyberfeminist debates over the last twenty years. While women’s identities have been reconfigured with the digital, the politics of experience and representation have also evolved to expose unsettling gender power relations as digital artefacts and people co-evolve. In this way the design and materiality of technology has revealed its darker sides. Despite the backdrop of the imagined utopias that formed the cybernetic and cyborg rhetoric of the 1960s, digital life for women now includes dystopic elements of discrimination, exclusion, objectification. This paper pits these dystopic realties against digital life’s utopianism. With a renewed emphasis on materiality and embodiment; it presents a conceptual and methodological discussion of ways of incorporating the body and emotional and sensorial practices into digital debates, and in this way it develops too a discussion on how we might live.
This paper explores the way in which the material process of head veiling (hijab) in London corre... more This paper explores the way in which the material process of head veiling (hijab) in London corresponds with embodied and philosophical notions of new postcolonial subjective identities. Since 2000 in Britain, there has been a rapid increase in the popularity of veiling for Muslim women, with many young Muslims choosing to adopt the headscarf voluntarily. Within the context of postcolonial histories, politics and legacies, tans-cultural flows and local trends, I discuss how dress objects and materials are manipulated into ‘hijab’ to create innovative ensembles to reflect diasporic lived realties. The paper analyses how veiling in this context forms part of a narrative of cultural postcolonialism, based on conceptions of Otherness as Britishness, within contemporary Muslim youth styles.
The emphasis in this paper is on strategies of appropriation, bricolage and hybridity. Within this matrix I examine folding, pulling and tucking as techniques of postcolonial recontextualisation that morph high street objects into performative and dynamic signs and symbols. My analysis throws into crisis static definitions of materials; instead my interrogation pivots around how materials undergo a process of metamorphosis through embodiment, and the ways in which these processes dismantle essential or totalising narratives. The paper presents a discussion of the negotiation of fabric and cloth as a means to understand expressions of postcolonial embodied, temporal and spatial values and aesthetics.
Featuring interactive performance lectures, screenings and debate, this dynamic half-day symposiu... more Featuring interactive performance lectures, screenings and debate, this dynamic half-day symposium examines the integration of the digital in the construction of the ‘self’, asking how this has complicated our experience of material reality. With the merging of the ‘real’ with the virtual on and off-line, ‘play’ with the creation of multiple ‘selves’ is now commonplace. This offers limitless opportunities for impersonation, deception and fakery; useful tools for political counter-strategies, but also the roots for anxieties regarding loss of control over issues of ‘real’ identity. So what are the implications for the material realities of the body in the mangled and mutable unreal ‘real’ of the virtual, digital realm?
Featuring presentations from Dr Shehnaz Suterwalla, Noam Toran, Onkar Kular, Ben Dalton and Leslie Kulesh, participants use the term ‘authenticity’ as a prism through which to explore and challenge questions regarding impersonation, politics and gendered resistance, addressing the question of whether the faked, forged, inauthentic multitude-identities afforded by the digital era are a cause for panic, or a point of potential?
Authenticity & ‘Real’? Bodies is presented in collaboration with Shehnaz Suterwalla and the Royal College of Art, London