American Comparative Literature Association 2026 Conference, Montreal, CA

WhiteFeather will present her paper, Wet Witches and Rewilded Biotech: Bastard Protocols for How to Grow a Homunculus (Badly) as part of the seminar, Anti-Authoritarian Aesthetics: Frontline Art and Performance in the Age of Autocracy, at the upcoming 2026 Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association to be held at the Palais des congrès de Montréal, February 26 – March 1, 2026.

WhiteFeather’s paper discusses the feral turn through feminist technoscientific methodology that reclaims the unruly, the embodied, and the affective within biotechnological practice. Positioned adjacent to ruderal witchcraft, the feral turn reorients knowledge-making toward the wet, disruptive interior ecologies of the body: menstrual blood, stem cells, sperm, saliva, and microbial agents that become the materials of resistance and regenerative magic. Through a series of interlinked case studies: artist residencies at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic (UK), TTTlabs BioFeral.BeachCamp (Crete), and Cultivamos Cultura (Portugal), I trace the lineage of emergent bastard protocols: ritualized, queer, illegitimate methods that transgress sterile logics of institutional biotech. Rather than neutral backdrops, these residencies also served as co-agents—juxtaposing landscapes, collaborators, and institutional ecologies that structurally shaped my experiments. From conjuring a queer homunculoid in a horseshit-lined hole in a garden box, to differentiating wild-type endometrial stem cells into neuronal forms, this work has operated in the cracks of legitimacy to cultivate feral futures through feminist material spirituality. Countering corporatized notions of ‘rewilding’ from remote tundras, my practice rewilds from within: promoting participatory rituals and epistemic leakages to reanimate the ‘lab’ with somatic revolt and witchy wetness.

Visit the ACLA website for more information here: https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting

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