CGF HIGHER SEMINAR & GEXCEL GENDER TALK SERIES: Tamara Shefer

This seminar works with hydrofeminist ecosophy (Neimanis, 2013, 2017a, 2017b), within the larger context of new feminist materialist, posthumanist and decoloninal feminist, queer scholarships in South Africa and globally to explore the productive possibilities of thinking with ocean and bodies of water. Drawing on a volume on hydrofeminist engagements in South Africa, currently in press, as well as a range of other initiatives in this context, I think with such transdisciplinary research, pedagogies, activism, and artistic works that are working towards challenging global inequalities and environmental damages towards justice for humans, more-than-humans and the planet. In South Africa, seas and beaches are particularly haunted sites where histories of colonisation, transatlantic slavery and more recently apartheid, characterised by segregation, exclusions and violence, bleed into the present, shaping the current and future. Mirroring larger planetary conditions, the ominous effects of capitalist exploitation, including extractivist oceanic mining, over-fishing, sewage spillage into oceans, and other invasive practices devastate the ocean/s and all life on earth. There is currently an inspiring emergence of ethico-political thinking, practices, arts and activisms in contemporary South Africa and many of these are working with and through oceans. This seminar draws on such thinking and praxis, sharing a wild sea swimming methodology practice as well as other scholarly and activist engagements and research-creations in, with, through ocean and oceanic imaginaries.

Tamara Shefer is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town. Her scholarship has been directed at intersectional gender and sexual justice, with particular emphasis on young people. She is currently engaged with re-conceptualising academic knowledge with emphasis on embodied, affective, feminist, decolonial pedagogies and research, and thinking with art and activism. Most recent books include: Knowledge, Power and Young Sexualities: A Transnational Feminist Engagement (co-authoured with J. Hearn, 2022, Routledge) and Routledge International Handbook of Masculinity Studies (co-edited with L. Gottzén & U. Mellström, 2020). She is also co-editor (with V. Bozalek & N. Romano) on a volume in press entitled Hydrofeminist thinking with ocean/s: Political and pedagogical possibilities (Routledge).

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