The CSPS Gender and Diversity Cluster invite you to a seminar by Tait Mandler: “(Re)Producing Straight Natures: From the Witch Hunts to Queer Unnaturings”.
In this seminar, Tait will offer a marxist feminist framework and historical analysis for conceptualising nature and sexuality through how they have been produced and mobilised by racialised capital accumulation.
We will explore how colonization and witch hunting: (1) imposed a binary sex-gender-sexuality logic through the destruction of women’s and indigenous people’s lifeworlds and knowledges; (2) enabled the development and hegemony of so-called ‘objective’ Western science that casts Man as external and superior to a feminized, exploitable Nature; and (3) continues to shape what kinds of queer politics and worlds seem possible today.
The presentation concludes with a cultural analysis of contemporary queer art that seeks to un- and re-do the nature of bodies and sexualities, such as SOPHIE’s xenofeminist hyperpop and Astrit Ismaili’s body extension performance art. In these works we see a queer alternative to mainstream “born this way” gay politics.
Event details
When: Thursday June 4, 16.00 – 17.30
Where: Gaia Plateau, Wageningen Campus
For questions, please contact Chizu Sato (chizu.sato@wur.nl)
This event is supported by: CSPS Gender and Diversity cluster, GEO33806: Intersectional Feminist Approaches, RSO36306: Beyond Sustainability, Pride Month Wageningen 2026.
Centre for Space, Place and Society 