Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures is an homage to a constellation of women writers, feminists, and creators whose voices draw a map of our current global political-environmental crisis and the interlinked massive violence, enabled by the denigration of life and human relationships. In a world in which "a woman's voice" exists in bodies called on to occupy important positions in corporations, government, and cultural and academic institutions, to work in factories, and to join the army—but whose bodies are systematically rendered vulnerable by gender violence and by the double burden imposed on them to perform both productive and reproductive labor—Emmelhainz asks: What is the task of thought and form in contemporary feminist-situated knowledge? Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures is a collection of essays rethinking feminist issues in the current context of the production of redundant populations, the omnipresence of the technosphere and environmental devastation, toxic relationships, toxic nationalisms, and more.
These reflections and dialogues are an urgent attempt to resist the present in the company of the voices of women like bell hooks, Sara Ahmed, Leslie Jamison, Lina Meruane, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Chris Kraus, Alaíde Foppa, Lorena Wolffer, Sayak Valencia, Pip Day, Veronica Gonzalez Peña, Eimear McBride, Simone de Beauvoir, Elena Poniatowska, Susan Sontag, Margaret Randall, Simone Weil, Arundhati Roy, Marta Lamas, Paul B. Preciado, Dawn Marie Paley, Raquel Gutiérrez, Sara Eliassen, and Silvia Gruner. Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures continues the discussion on how to undo misogyny and dismantle heteropatriarchy's sublimating and denigrating tricks against women, which are intrinsically linked to colonialism and violence against the Earth.
Introduction
J'ai une voix de ce qu'on appelle "femme"
Reasonable Murder
A Sensorium of Violence
Expressionist Postcard
Love Revolution Fear Strike
From Las niñas bien to the Primates of Park Avenue
Mangomitas Postcard
One on One: LakeVerea vs. Bellas Artes
The Preprogrammed State of Being Happy
Crisis of Relationality and Being/Having
Abusive Love
Water Running under the Bridge
And Water Not Running
Vulnerability
More about Empathy
Decolonization
Maternity Slavery Rebellion Creativity Jouissance
Voice Desire Body Difference Love
Existential Eroticism and Modernism in Jeff Koons and Marcel Duchamp
Postcard for Historias Propias (Stories of Our Own) by Lorena Wolffer
The Pencil of Nature and Other Appropriations
Cosmopolite Postcard
Narcissism, Human Rights, and Postimperialist Utopias
Palestine Today
Chimalistac Postcard
Uprooting, Rights, and State Violence
COVID-19
To Dismantle the Engine
The New Normality
Coda
Notes
Index
Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent translator, writer, researcher, and lecturer based in Mexico City. Her writings on film, the Palestine Question, art, cinema, culture, and neoliberalism have been translated into several languages and presented at an array of international venues. She is the author of The Tyranny of Common Sense: Mexico's Post-Neoliberal Conversion, El cielo está incompleto: Cuaderno de viaje en Palestina, and Jean-Luc Godard's Political Filmmaking.