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toward a feminist boundary object-oriented ontology...or should it be a boundary object-oriented feminism? these are both queer methods Handout for Objects/Textures, King & Hayward at Queer Method, University of Pennsylvania, 31 October 2013 Katie King, Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College Park/Email: katking@umd.edu Home Page: http://katiekin.weebly.com/ Kings talk website: http://fembooo.blogspot.com
As I delved deeper into the relations between developers and users, it became clear that a kind of communicative tangle was occurring. I used the work of Gregory Bateson, who had studied these sorts of communicative mishaps under the heading of double binds. As with Batesons work on schizophrenics, and what he called the trans-contextual syndrome, the messages that were coming at level one from the systems developers were not being heard on that level by the users and vice versa. What was obvious to one was a mystery to another. What was trivial to one was a barrier to another. Yet, clarifying this was never easy. I began to see this as a problem of infrastructureand its relative nature. (Star 2010:610)

NEPANTLERAS, WIZARDS, ENOUGH WORLDS, GRACE, AND PERIPHERAL PARTICIPATIONS I use the word nepantla to theorize liminality and to talk about those who facilitate passages between worlds, whom Ive named nepantleras. (Anzaldu 2002: 1) These are what I refer to as wizards: that is, they are both repositories of local knowledge about the social and technical situations, and simultaneously, they know enough of more than one layer to perform rare cross-layering coordination. By definition, this work is interdisciplinary. (Star 1995: 107) I guess Id locate my hope in being part of enough different worlds simultaneously. . . . Ive tried to model a way of being in this kind of an organization that makes sense to me. It makes sense to me in the ways that its been formed by all these other worlds that Im part of. (Suchman & Scharmer 1999) "Differential consciousness requires grace, flexibility, and strength: enough strength to confidently commit to a well-defined structure of identity for one hour, day, week, month, year; enough flexibility to self-consciously transform that identity according to the requisites of another oppositional ideological tactic if readings of power's formation require it; enough grace to recognize alliance with others committed to egalitarian social relations and race, gender, sex, class, and social justice, when these other readings of power call for alternative oppositional stands." (Sandoval 2000: 60) People often cannot see what they take for granted until they encounter someone who does not take it for granted. (Bowker and Star 1999: 305) feminist queer theory, a conceptual and material INFRASTRUCTURE (King 2001), necessarily TRANSCONTEXUAL its objects such as ideas and tools its players as theorists, makers, and agents within identity politics its sites of production such as schools of thought, particular institutions in time, forms of power its layered assemblages, accretions and networks such as disciplines and their critiques, feminist activity in various places, times and generations, political actions and resistances. TRANSCONTEXTUAL (Star & Ruhleder 1996: 127 quote Bateson 1972: 276; Bateson: 272; Clarke quotes Star syllabus 2010: 589; Star 2010: 610) phrases quoted from Bateson: "genesis of tangles," "the weave of contextual structure," and "transcontextual syndrome More Bateson: It seems that both those whose life is enriched by transcontextual gifts and those who are impoverished by transcontextual confusions are alike in one respect: for them there is always or often a double take. A falling leaf [or] the greeting of a friendis not just that and nothing more. Star syllabus: borderlands are full of motion and emotion. TRANSDISCIPLINARY REQUIRES LOCAL TAYLORING AS A FORM OF WORK (Star 2010: 607) [different forms of materiality, gaps between formal representations and back-stage work] subtly influenced the development of boundary objects in the sense of understanding local tailoring as a form of work that is invisible to the whole group and how a shared representation may be quite vague and at the same time quite useful. boundary objects, such as standpoint theory, intersectionality, material feminisms as spaces for communication as carefully tacit, deliberatively discreet grounds for collaboration without agreement as objects wrought over time through intensive negotiations over practice and terminology as structured objects that permit recursion at different levels of system holding paradox in tension as process points in cycle of standardization, generation of residual categories, emergent alliances ON GROWTH AND DEATH OF BOUNDARY OBJECTS (Star 2010: 613-4) Over time, people (often administrators or regulatory agencies) try to control the tacking back-and forth, and especially, to standardize and make equivalent the ill-structured and well-structured aspects of the particular boundary object.

ON AUTHORITY AND COMMITMENTS: SIMULTANEOUS FORMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Star 1995: 22) "We honestly believe that there are no positions that are epistemologically superior to any others. But I do at the same time argue with and try to overthrow those I don't agree with! Relativism in this sense does not imply neutrality--rather, it implies forswearing claims to absolute epistemological authority. This is quite different from abandoning moral commitments. UNDER GLOBAL ACADEMIC RESTRUCTURING . movement among knowledge worlds is mandated -- in terms hardly consistent interdisciplinarity -- justifies consolidated units and resources restructuring promotes an easily assessed instrumental practicality, as if the standard for good interdisciplinary methodology was easy assessment disciplinary chauvinisms are made urgent, personal and compensatory quantitative assessments of productivity and authority -- measures for advancement, status or just getting a job done establishing and maintaining authority in an environment in which many knowledge worlds compete the empirical, the data-driven, the concrete, and the local are all more manageable, more easily broken up into task, then held accountable to a very particular set of folks and their properly urgent ethics Yet diverging knowledge worlds keep making such management problematic, uneven, partial, at times virtually impossible Being inside and moved around literally by the very material and conceptual structures you are analyzing and writing about is a kind of self-consciousness only partially available for explicit, or direct discussion Under global academic restructuring we are obliged to network among all these lively agencies, as we look to see things as they exist for others, in different degrees of resolution, of grain of detail. INTENSIVE PRACTICES, knowledges, definitions, boundary work: closely negotiated among relatively bounded communities of practice; such as disciplines-in-the-making, local alliances, threatened units, long-lived organizations; emphasis on rigor and membership EXTENSIVE PRACTICES, knowledges, definitions, boundary work: speculative connections, practical coalitions, trial and error learning; such as transdisciplinary projects, transmedia storytelling, alternative practices-in-the-making; emphasis on peripheral participation and the edges of standardized practices EXTENSIVE investigations perpendicularly analyze relative and relational shifts across authoritative and alternative knowledges EXTENSIVE displays can work without displacing INTENSIVE work of specific communities of practice Boundary objects sometimes mediate among extensive and intensive feminist & queer practices simultaneously. For example, Kathy Davis (2008) calls intersectionality a buzzword, but thinking of it as a boundary object would more carefully allow us to consider both its simultaneous intensive and extensive uses, allow us to pay attention to its INTENSIVE local tailorings in the plural as well as its values as a shared something across EXTENSIVE gatherings, reconciling divergent critiques and solutions. Extensive explorations of intensive meanings works out in and around GRAIN OF DETAIL membership peripheral participation intensive knowledge management extensive knowledge inspections distributed author agencies distributed, niche, emergent audiences or uses scoping out: assemblage and infrastructure scaling in: closely negotiated disciplinary interests And attention to any particular grain of detail provokes response and affect. And that matters. In the midst of such cognitive overload, it helps to experiment with strategies for working with overload, rather than denying it. Transdisciplinary work befriends and experiences a range of academic and other genres of writing, entailment and analysis, befriends and experiences their consequent and diverging values. The rigor of transcontextual feminist methods comes into play when we welcome peripheral participations (robust across sites) as well as work for an exquisite sensitivity to each horizon of possible resources and infrastructures, local exigencies, and differential memberships (plastic and local). Transcontextual queer feminisms as I have come to understand them, work to remain curious, even about and in the midst the affects of affiliation and disidentification, scoping extensively and scaling intensively among Ecologies of Knowledge. Stigmergy is the word I am using nowadays for that feeling of being in among and as the self-organizing bits that are /es/system-ing. Usually defined very mechanically as indirect coordination, stigmergy names a form of self-organization associated with insects, originally termites. Flash mobs and the political action of, say, the Occupy Movement are also called stigmergic. Boundary objects as a kind of collective consensus have stigmergic aspect. But notice that I have shifted all this from mechanism to affect, from a description from the outside to feeling it all happening with. All references can be found online at: http://fembooo.blogspot.com