Anna and Grace invite you to gunnhilde’s leg, a critical theory reading group with a focus on the body and technology.
Each session will focus on an excerpt from a work of theory alongside a companion text or interpretation. We encourage you to look at the materials in advance and will provide pdfs where necessary. You don’t need to be familiar with critical approaches or any of the proposed readings to participate.
Contact [email protected] with any questions.
Summer term sessions to be confirmed.
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**We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher: screening and discussion**
Friday 15 May, 18:30 | Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square, London
A 65-minute cinematic experiment (Close and Remote, 2025) exploring the continuing relevance of late theorist Mark Fisher’s ideas on capitalism, culture, and the future. With over 70 invited contributors listed the film blends documentary, performance, new music, and hauntological fiction. The main narrative follows Parkins - a time-slipped character - through ghostly landscapes and digital spaces, tracing Fisher’s thoughts from the 1990s to our algorithmic present. Created collaboratively by over 70 artists through Instagram (@markfisherfilm), the film embodies Fisher’s call for collective imagination beyond capitalist realism.
This screening will conclude with an open roundtable discussion on the film’s depiction of Fisher’s ideas and their enduring influence in today’s cultural and political landscape.
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Tuesday 24 March, 6.30 in Birkbeck Faculty of Humanities @ 43 Gordon Square, Room 106
This session will focus on animacies and animism in Mel Y. Chen and David Abram.
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Tuesday 10 March, 6.30 in Birkbeck Faculty of Humanities @ 43 Gordon Square, Room 106
This session will focus on two formulations of neoliberal biopolitics: homonationalism and ablenationalism. We’ll be discussing these ideas with reference to Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages (2007), David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s The Biopolitics of Disability (2015), and Puar’s The Right to Maim (2017). See the reading pack below.
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Tuesday 10 February, 6.30 in Birkbeck Faculty of Humanities @ 43 Gordon Square, Room 106
Join us for a discussion of Julia Kristeva’s ‘abject’. We’ll be reading exerpts from Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1982) and Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous Feminine (1993), which can be accessed via the reading pack below.
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Tuesday, 13 January at 6.30pm in Birkbeck Faculty of Humanities @ 43 Gordon Square, Room 106
This session we’ll be talking posthumanism via an excerpt from Rosi Braidotti's The Posthuman (2013). The reading pack also includes a commentary on Braidotti's position from Dan Goodley's article on Posthuman Disability Studies.
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Tuesday, 9 December at 6.30pm in Birkbeck Faculty of Humanities @ 43 Gordon Square, Room 106
We have something different in mind for our last session of term. Instead of discussing a set text, we would like to invite you to reflect on the themes of our discussions so far and ‘bring in’ something which relates to those themes. This could be a text, a writer, an object, an image, an artwork, a primary source, or anything else you like. In practical terms, you might want to read something aloud, have an image ready to share, or just say a little bit about what you've been thinking about. This will also be a good opportunity to return to the texts we’ve read and think about how they fit together.
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Tuesday, 25 November at 6.30pm in Birkbeck Faculty of Humanities @ 43 Gordon Square, Room 106
Our third session will focus on anaestheticised subjects and neurochemical selves in Nikolas Rose and Laurent de Sutter. The reading pack includes excepts from Rose’s The Politics of Life Itself (2007) and de Sutter’s Narcocapitalism (2018).
Gunnhilde's Leg volume three.pdf
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Tuesday, 28 October at 6.30pm in Birkbeck Faculty of Humanities @ 43 Gordon Square, Room 106
For this second session, we will be focussing on the concepts of biopolitics and psychopolitics as described by Michel Foucault and Byung-Chul Han. In the reading pack attached, you will find excerpts from Foucault’s The History of Sexuality Vol I and Han’s Psychopolitics.
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Tuesday, 23 September at 6.30pm in Birkbeck Faculty of Humanities @ 43 Gordon Square, Room 106.
Bodies and technology in Donna Harway. We will base our discussion around an excerpt from Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, which you can find in the pdf below. We’ve also included some additional gobbets from other texts which we find useful as companion pieces. Please read as much or as little as you would like!
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