Conference: Luce Irigaray Circle Conference: Topologies of Sexual Difference, Melbourne 10-12 December 2014

Model and image by Steven Stahlberg

After a prolonged absence, Ky is back (with profuse apologies) to present the recently announced Luce Irigaray Circle Conference: Topologies of Sexual Difference. Taking place (perhaps quite aptly) in Antipodean Melbourne over three days from 10-12 December 2014, the conference seems particularly positioned so as to engage with Irigaray's work in relation to growing academic interest in posthumanism, new materialisms, sensory studies and critical geographies.

"In order to think and to experience sexual difference, Irigaray suggests that the Western tradition's conception of space and time could be reconsidered. There are at least three senses of topologies we seek to address: as the places in which bodies are and become, as ideal spaces of conceptualization, and as the designation of specific contexts."

Confirmed keynotes include American-based scholars Elizabeth Grosz and Pheng Cheah, with further keynotes to be announced at a later date. The conference intends to embrace a diverse variety of humanities-based disciplines and will include an exhibition of visual art.

Organisers are currently seeking abstracts and exhibition proposals. As an extra incentive for current PhD candidates or recent graduates, the Irigaray Circle is also sponsoring the 6th annual Karen Burke Memorial Prize for the best submitted paper. More information and email contacts can be found at the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy.

Book: Jonathan Kemp, The Penetrated Male

Jonathan Kemp's new book The Penetrated Male, published through open-access outfit Punctum Books, takes a discursive tour through key texts of early twentieth century literature to locate and unpack the lurking concept of the penetrated male body filling their pages.

From Daniel Paul Schreber through to James Joyce, The Penetrated Male assembles an argument which pushes against the binary reduction of the penetrated male with the feminine and its consequent threat of its erasure. Kemp draws together the threads of this incomprehensibility and inarticulability, outlining the struggle and the tantalising/terrifying failure of the logic of language to circumscribe the rupture posed by the penetrated male body. What he also finds in this pursuit is "a profoundly productive aspect of discourse, generating ways of opening up the male body":

"The penetrated male body ... is capable of not only exposing the gendered structuration of language, but of destroying the entire structure and using the pieces to build something else entirely: a form of representation more grounded in the shifting realities of flux and sensations, more geared towards registering the intensities of material bodies."

The Penetrated Male is available for free download from the Punctum Books website. You may also want to take some time to browse their catalogue of books, and journals published (not to mention their associated titles), many of which are open-access or print-on-demand if required in hard-copy.

Exhibition & Seminar: The Second Sex - A Visual Footnote, 25 May - 13 July, Noisy-le-Sec

Marianne Wex, LET’S TAKE BACK OUR SPACE.



Le Gallerie (Contemporary Art Centre, Noisy-le-Sec in the Eastern suburbs of Paris) exhibits The Second Sex - A Visual Footnote from 25 May to 13 July of this year. For those fortunate enough to be in the neighbourhood, this "visual essay" inspired by Simone de Beauvoir's book offers installations from established international (and notably, non-French) artists Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven, Marianne Wex and Ilene Segalove. Also in the mix are: throughout the exhibition duration, screenings of activist videos, documentaries, video art and experimental films plumbed from the archive at the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir; as a closing bonus on 15 June, a roundtable discussion with Nicole Fernández Ferrer from the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, art critic and curator Elisabeth Lebovici and art historian Giovanna Zapperi; and later that day, a seminar in collaboration with Travelling Féministe.

 

 

More information concerning the exhibition can be found here (in French), including an information flyer and a longer release containing a "visual note" by Tobi Maier (in French and English).

 

 

 

Book: Jean-Paul Martinon, The End of Man

Jean-Paul Martinon teams up with Punctum Books for this eloquent and  personal (or "bio-graphical", as suggested by the author) offering, The End of Man, just published this month. Discursively probing at the black box of "masculinity", Martinon reinscribes the term with corporeal possibilities, refusing to wear the divides of man-woman, male-female, masculine-feminine, virile-effeminate.

 

With nods to Levinas, Derrida, Nancy, and a plenitude of current queer materialist scholars, Martinon weaves between discussions such as those of the mandates of language, the male body's eschatological existence, and contingent relations between gendered bodies. And all the while he choreographs an elegant dance over, between and around the threads of masculine failure.

"But hush, this male body is slowly stirring, turning over, progressively regaining consciousness ... the need for mastery steadily clenching ‘its’ grip. This slow turn reveals his many sides, angular, hairy, robust, smelly, warm, delicate, graceful. An abyss in every crevice, a mass at every turn, this male body can reach neither a plenitude of meaning nor a truly stable referent. His language, like his body, betrays him at every turn: never quite masculine, ever more virile/effeminate, never enough feminine."

The End of Man is available from Punctum Books as an open-access ebook downloadable for free or in print for a small fee. We are also fortunate to have Jean-Paul Martinon's response to Catherine Malabou at our recent BiM event archived on our site (available for streaming on the player to the right or from our recordings page).

 

The Bodies in Movement Seminar Series presents Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, 14 June, Edinburgh, 2-6pm

The Bodies in Movement Seminar Series is delighted to present Rosemarie Garland-Thomson as the second guest speaker on our lineup of academic seminars for Spring-Summer 2012, taking place in room G2, 19 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD.

Rosemarie Garland‐Thomson, Professor of Women's Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, will join us for a half‐day, close discussion of her most current research. Garland‐Thomson's pioneering work in the field of disability studies has set the benchmark for research within and without the area. Her recent focus, within her rubric of "misfitting", engages with material feminism(s) and disability studies, attempting to explore, negotiate and harness their productive intricacies as coextensive fields.

This is a free event, but booking is essential. Participants are asked to read the following texts in advance, which will be provided by the organisers upon confirmation of attendance:

• "Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory." NSWA Journal 14.3 (2002): 1‐32.
• "Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept." Hypatia 26.3 (2011): 591‐609.

To secure a place at the seminar, please email one of the conference organisers. Further details on the BiM Seminar Series is available here.
Karin Sellberg (k.j.k.sellberg@gmail.com)
Lena Wånggren (l.e.wanggren@sms.ed.ac.uk)
Kamillea Aghtan (kamillea@hotmail.com)


Order of events:


2:00‐2:15pm Introduction
2:15‐3:15pm Rosemarie Garland‐Thomson presents her work, "Disability, Gender, Bodies"
3:15‐3:45pm Tea and coffee break
3:45‐4:45pm Responses by Carole Jones, Andrea Zittlau and Bettina Papenburg
4:45‐6:00pm Open discussion


Room G2
19 George Square
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh EH8 9LD

Conference: NeuroCultures – NeuroGenderings II, Vienna, 13-15 September 2012

The Gender Research Office at the University of Vienna together with the NeuroCultures Network are providinng a veritable feast of interdisciplinary scholarship in the fusion of the brain and critical gender theory.

Currently calling for abstracts for 20 minute panel or poster presentations, the three-day "NeuroCultures - NeuroGenderings II" conference held at the University of Vienna divides itself into seven loose thematic strands, from empirical research and methodological queries to the tantalising fields of neurogovermentality and epistemological discussions on feminist materialism(s) and queer technoscience.

"With the expansion of the domains of neuroscientific knowledge, today we are witnessing an abundance of emerging neurocultures (such as neuropedagogy, neuroeconomics, neuromarketing, neurotheology, neuroaesthetics, among others) in which bio-socio-cultural relations are (re-) negotiated within research, neuro-(technological)applications, and public discourses. ... The cerebral subject is a specific kind of subject; the brain vocabulary produces a culturally and historically specific version of the human and, as such, impacts individual, social, cultural and political spheres."

The deadline for submission of proposals is set at 25 March 2012. For more information on the conference aims and further detail on the thematic strands of the conference, visit the conference website.

Lecture: Claire Colebrook, "Seduction, Gender and Genre: Derrida/Cixous, Cixous/Derrida"

In March of 2008, Claire Colebrook presented the paper "Seduction, Gender and Genre: Derrida/Cixous, Cixous/Derrida" to the Engaging in the Humanities Symposium at Utrecht University, in which she carefully pulls upon the complex problematics of friendship acknowledged by Jacques Derrida in his philosophical engagements in order to outline two very different kinds of relations - the violent and contestatory fraternity of "philosophy as politics" and another which places itself not at the scene of war but at the boudoir of seduction and love.

In Colebrook's analysis of Derrida and Hélène Cixous's interactivity, their coupling becomes redefined as event which opens and delimits the potential for deconstruction and brings it beyond the phenomenological tradition of philosophy. The lecture, downloadable as a pdf from the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University, offers a provocative and resonant counterpoint to Michael O'Rourke's keynote address at the Bodies in Movement conference some months ago.

"Thus we might distinguish the mode of deconstruction in relation to the friend, where the other text also working at the limits of metaphyics is shown to fall into a logos of presence, from the deconstructive relation of seduction and love. In that latter mode the text is unreadable, offering itself as what the philosopher could not say, could not begin to say."