Embodied Workshop – BA Feminist and Queer Technoscience
Goldsmiths, University of London
4 December 2023
Poetics of Filmic Breath in the Irish Catholic Maternal
An embodied research and movement workshop in dialogue with the Feminine-to-Come
Still from film practice - Poetics of Filmic Breath in the Irish Catholic Maternal
This workshop took place as part of the BA Feminist and Queer Technoscience module led by Dr Lenka Vráblíková. I was invited to share my embodied research through a movement-based workshop titled Feminine-to-Come in the Irish Catholic Maternal and the Poetics of Filmic Breath, Réidhleán. Together with around twenty students, we explored breath, movement, and filmic body as a collective modality of inquiry.
Framing the Workshop in Context
The module explores the provocative and fraught encounters feminist and queer politics have had with science and technology across the 20th and 21st centuries. Through texts by Donna Haraway, Sadie Plant, Elizabeth Grosz, Legacy Russell, Wendy Chun, C. Riley Snorton, Paul Preciado, and others, students critically engage with figures such as the cyborg, the posthuman, and the racialised body, while interrogating the militarised, ideological, and biopolitical underpinnings of formal technological structures such as binary code, DNA, and computer logic.
Against this backdrop, my workshop invited students into an embodied space that foregrounded breath and relationality as critical tools for feminist and queer worldmaking. Drawing from my research on Irish Catholic maternal shame, transgenerational memory, and Luce Irigaray’s shared air, the session offered an alternative framework for engaging these complex theoretical intersections through movement, feeling, and filmic encounter. It provided a live, sensory method for students to reflect on how technoscientific imaginaries are not only inscribed in bodies but also resisted, transformed, and reworlded through artistic practice.
By inviting students to move, pause, and breathe with the filmic body—Poetics of Filmic Breath in the Irish Catholic Maternal and Hydro-Feminine—we explored what it might mean to attend to bodies and knowledges often rendered illegible in dominant epistemologies. The workshop foregrounded “shared air” as an alternative rhythm of knowing, and the maternal archive as a site of both trauma and creative possibility.
