Ubiquitous Women: Everywhere, Everyware and Everywear

A Guest Lecture by Dr Sarah Kember, Professor of New Technologies of Communication at the Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London and Convenor of MA Digital Media.

This talk examines the concept of ubiquity through the configuration of gender, technology and time. It looks at environments of ubiquitous women who are everywhere (hypervisible, luminous), everyware (bound up in the lustrous luminosity of smart glass technology) and everywear (in wearables whose regulatory role is oriented to the reproduction of women as sexual objects and productive, optimized subjects). The talk also offers an intervention into polarized forms of feminist time telling by arguing for the necessary conflict between potential – as the structured time of labour – and potentia – as the unstructured time of life itself. Since potential and potentia are co-constituted and co-constitutive of ubiquitous women, it is not possible to choose between them on the basis of a feminist ethics or politics.

• Reception to follow.