Space Invaders

Nirmal Puwar's lecture Space Invaders
looks at the 'arrival' of women and racialised minorities in spaces from which
they have been historically or conceptually excluded, such as the art world or
the public domain. Formally, today, women and racialised minorities can enter
positions from which they were previously excluded. However, social spaces are
not blank and open for 'any body' to occupy. There is a connection between
bodies and space, which is built, repeated and contested over time. While
anyone may, in theory, enter, it is certain types of bodies that are tacitly
designated as being the 'natural' occupants of specific positions. Some bodies
are deemed as having the right to belong within, while others are marked as
trespassers who are, in accordance with how both spaces and bodies are imagined
(politically, historically and conceptually), circumscribed as being 'out of
place'. Not being the somatic norm, they are 'space invaders'. Investigating
the paradox of the increasing proximity of hitherto outside 'dissonant' bodies
with inside 'proper' bodies, allows us to see how less obvious, nuanced
exclusion operates within institutions via the tacit reservation of privileged
positions for the somatic norm. A brilliant analysis journeying through
ontological anxiety, social cloning and super surveillance, taking us from high
theory to everyday cultural spaces and back again...