#9 The End of Sexual DIfference? - 09/05/2019


9 May | 5.00 - 6.30pm | Room 1, LAHRI (29-31 Clarendon Place) | All welcome!



In our first session of the new semester, we will be reading Butler’s essay ‘The End of SexualDifference?’, taken from Undoing Gender (2004), alongside James Penney’s introduction to his provocative polemic After Queer Theory (2014).

Undoing Gender collects together a series of essays in which Butler asks the ever-prescient question of how restrictively normative conceptions of gendered and sexual life might be ‘undone’. Utilising discourses of ‘undoing’ and ‘dispossession’, Butler (re)theorises the precarious ontology of gendered and sexual selves in Hegelian terms of recognition and desire. As she considers the issue of how the self is undone by its desire for the Other, she reflects on precisely what is claimed, and what is lost, in processes of gendered and sexual subjectification. Subjects covered in the essays range from gay marriage, norms of kinship and heterosexuality, to transgender, transsexual and intersex activist movements and their effect on feminist and queer theory in the academy.

In  ‘The End of Sexual Difference?’,  Butler re-evaluates the volatile status of the terms ‘gender’, ‘sexuality’, and ‘sexual difference’ in the fields of feminist and queer theory, and in activist discourses beyond academic institutions. She assesses the genealogy of the term ‘sexual difference’, and how it speaks to relationships between about justice, equality, difference, and freedom. As with the other essays included in Undoing Gender, Butler outlines a certain ethics of accountability in which she explicitly considers her position of enunciation as a theorist participating in the theoretical and political debate. How, she asks in particular, do we deal with disagreement and conflict generated during debate?

To aid our discussion, we’ve paired Butler’s essay with Penney’s manifesto, which joins the dissenting faction of scholars who claim that ‘queer theory has run its course’. Penney offers a decidedly more incendiary approach to disciplinary definitions of gender and sexuality, arguing for a total reappraisal of queer methodology. Reading both texts in tandem, we will compare and contrast Butler and Penney's negotiation with the tensions between queer and feminist theory. All students and researchers are warmly invited!

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