
XXIX
In/Equalities: From the Reflecting Mirror to the Diffraction Apparatus
With quotes from Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Judith Butler, Michelle Lazar, Evelien Geerts, Iris Van der Tuin, Clare Hemmings, Antonio Centeno, Carolina Suárez Rasmussen and Ana Solano
Created and contributed by Orianna Calderón, 2018
Keywords: Equality, Diffraction
Equality and gender equality are problematic concepts. Michelle Lazar explains that within a liberal perspective ‘equality implies “same as men”, where the yardstick is that already set by men. Instead of a radical shift in the gender order, women therefore are required to fit into the prevailing androcentric structures’. However, as Lazar also argues, the ideal of achieving equality remains ‘historically important for politically disadvantaged groups of women who have been systematically denied equality under the law’. Looking for a way of discussing in/equalities differently, I have resorted to Haraway and Barad’s proposal of thinking in terms of diffraction rather than reflection: not the reproduction of the same, but a critical consciousness attentive to differences and their effects.
On twelve DVDs on a corkboard, I pasted quotes from academic texts and from the interviews I carried out with filmmakers. Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Judith Butler, Michelle Lazar, Evelien Geerts, Iris Van der Tuin, Clare Hemmings, Antonio Centeno, Carolina Suárez Rasmussen and Ana Solano. All of these quotes contain insights related to equality and difference. My idea was to build a diffraction apparatus that, by cutting these quotes together-apart, makes legible different approaches to in/equalities.
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