‘The Subversion of Paradoxes’ — A 2018 Retrospective: Part I (Ch. 5/10)
Chapter 5— Beyond Desires: The Futures of Fashion, Food & Sex
Ahead of the upcoming 5th anniversary edition of IAM Weekend (March 21–23, 2019 in Barcelona), in this 10-chapter retrospective we recap the key learnings, activities and next steps that emerged from our 2018 research theme: The Subversion of Paradoxes. In this chapter we present the key learnings from the ‘Beyond Desires’ session of our annual event.
As a lack of ethics and hyper-capitalist tendencies in fast food, fast fashion and porn lead to the fetishisation of consumption, what should routine behaviours such as dressing, eating and having sex look like in a post-capitalist 2025?
To help us get started, at IAM Weekend 18 we heard from Goys & Birls co-founder Juliette Lizotte, designer and educator Marina Dragzilla and internet equality collective Feminist Internet, all of whom are using the tools of contradictions, collisions and coexistence to challenge our current contexts and begin a redesign of desires that is fair, positive and inclusive.
Here the three key learnings from this session:
1. Collaborative, creative utopias can help us to understand the self in the digital age
2. Fashion can be repurposed to focus on positivity, wellbeing and togetherness, not competition and consumerism
3. We need to better understand and adopt feminist political imaginaries of the internet promoting values as equality, consent, pluralism and safety
The quotes from where these key learnings come from:
“Sometimes it’s hard to do the right thing. When the system surrounds you like frightening. It’s like they want me to feel oppressed when they don’t even know that I’m fighting. Cause life’s not easy. I’m not made out of steel. Don’t forget that I’m human, don’t forget that I’m real. Act like you’re free but you will never be”
Juliette Lizotte, Co-Founder, Goys & Birls
“There’s a lot of consumption, especially regarding women. To be a woman you need to (buy) nail polish, waxing, hair, stocking, shoes… and there’s a lot of bullshit going on … There’s a lot of things that you don’t actually need because fashion should be about the attitude of you being free and saying ‘well I can walk on the street like this’ even when I am not in heels, but fashion keeps convincing you that you need stuff.”
Marina Dragzilla, designer and educator
“The [Feminist Internet] manifesto itself really embodies … our desire to intervene in the development of the web to encourage equality, for everybody, but also a desire to instantiate a new kind, or at least a different kind, of feminist internet political imaginary which is going to offer alternatives to the dominant narratives of capitalism.”
Feminist Internet, internet equality collective
‘The Subversion of Paradoxes’ — A 2018 Retrospective is a 10-chapter retrospective where we recap the key learnings, activities and next steps that emerged from IAM’s 2018 research theme.
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👉 Join us for IAM Weekend 19, our annual meeting for creative agents of change who care about the futures of the internet(s) where you can discover, be inspired and interconnect with diverse perspectives around our research theme for 2019: ‘The Quantumness of Archipelagos’.
