QUILTING POINTS:

We are delighted to formally announce that, for our summer term guest talk, we will be joined by Dr Natalia Cecire, lecturer (assistant professor) in English and American literature at the University of Sussex. We are also pleased to say that we'll be hosting this talk in collaboration with the American Studies Research Group, based in the School of English ( https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/english-research-innovation/doc/american-studies-research-group-1 ).  Cecire's talk draws on Freud's use of nineteenth-century theories of microscopic life in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to situate Marianne Moore's poetics, often described as "shelled" or in various ways hard-surfaced and repelling, in relation to the surprisingly intense research in the biology of sex, inheritance, and generation at Bryn Mawr, the women's college that she attended from 1905 to 1909. Following the Q&A, we will be hosting a wine reception in the School of English.  All students ...

23 May | 5.00 - 6.30pm | Room 1, LAHRI (29-31 Clarendon Place) | All welcome! In Antigone’s Claim (2000) , Butler begins by outlining her assumption that the figure of Antigone may potentially point to an alternative to what she terms the growing feminist trend of ‘seek[ing] the backing and authority of the state to implement feminist policy aims.’ Yet Butler’s aims shift as she begins an engagement with the history of scholarship on Antigone, including Hegel, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss and others, who determine Antigone as the pre-social and pre-political embodiment of kinship relations definitively separated from the state. Butler disrupts the demarcation of kinship and state, rendering Antigone’s dual act of refusal – actual and linguistic – as one of both transgression and assimilation to highlight the entanglement of kinship relations and the polis . From this vantage point, Butler elaborates on the subversive potential of Antigone’s speech act as one that opens sedimented and i...

We're interrupting our steady stream of reading to announce that, for our penultimate seminar, we  will be hosting a special guest lecture by Dr Natalia Cecire (University of Sussex). Dr Cecire will be discussing her ongoing research project, 'Quartz Contentment', details of which can be found on her website here:  http://natalia.cecire. org/research/ .  The event will take place on  Tuesday 4th June   from  5 - 7pm  (location TBC). A wine reception will follow the Q&A session after Dr Cecire's paper. We really look forward to welcoming Dr Cecire to the University of Leeds this coming June, and we hope as many of staff and students as possible will be able to make it.  Further details about the paper itself and the location will be sent out in due course. In the meantime, save the date - it looks set to be a fascinating paper.

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, ...