New Knowledges? Thinking Across Feminist Philosophy and Marine Life Sciences

Zum Vortrag

In When Species Meet (2008) Donna Haraway proposes that creatures’ identities and affinities emerge through their encounters, their relationships. Following Haraway’s lead, I attend to how different species sense and apprehend one another, leaving impressions—concrescences of perceptual data, or texture. This essay reports on fieldwork alongside marine biologists and with a population of cup corals (B. elegans) housed at the Long Marine Laboratory, Santa Cruz, California. While I assisted researchers who were studying metabolic rates and reproductive strategies in coral communities, these cup corals simultaneously taught me that being and sensing are inextricably enfolded. We were variously situated—corals generating generations, me interpretations. We met through a material-semiotic apparatus I call “fingeryeyes.” As an act of sensuous manifesting, fingeryeyes offers a queer reading of how making sense and sensual meaning are produced through determinable and permeable species boundaries.

Zur Vortragenden

Eva Hayward is an Assistant Professor in Gender & Women's Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson. She has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of New Mexico, and the University of Cincinnati. She held postdoctoral fellowships at Duke University and Uppsala University (Sweden). Her research focuses on the study of sensation, sexuality, and marine science. She has recently published articles in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Cultural Anthropology, Parallax, differences, and Women’s Studies Quarterly.

In winter term 2019, Eva Hayward stays in Graz as a guest professor via the Fulbright NAWI Graz Role Model programme.