QUILTING POINTS:

Thursday 15 November | 5 - 6.30pm | LHRI | All welcome  For our third session of the year, we will be focusing on Butler’s analyses of hate speech, censorship, and ‘obscenity’ in the introduction to Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997). Excitable Speech continues Butler’s investigation of subject categories in the context of language and rhetoric. She returns to speech act theories, this time developing questions related to hate speech, injurious name-calling (such as racial slurs or epithets), pornography, rap lyrics, and gay self-expression in the US military – all these topics receive an introductory gloss in this week’s material. Central to her thesis is the rhetorical elision between physical and linguistic injury. Can words wound? How are bodies implicated in, or interpellated by, verbal pain or injury, such as name-calling or legal legislation? Her introduction, and the study as a whole, demonstrates an anxiety about the limits of resignification....

When : 3:30pm, Thursday 3rd December Where : LHRI Seminar Room 1, 29–31 Clarendon Place ( map ) Text : Hall (1997) The Work of Representation (ch. 3&4, pp. 39–51) ( download ) The last Quilting Points session of the semester is on Thursday the 3rd of December, for which we are reading Stuart Hall's 'The Work of Representation' (1997). Note: we are only reading chapters 3&4—although feel free to read the whole thing! Hall makes a broad analysis of theories of representation, linking the thought of Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, Marx, and Gramsci as they negotiate the relationship between language and society. This text will also prepare us for next semester's reading, in which we will look at the theorists and philosophers who influenced Hall's work. As always, everyone is welcome to attend. We look forward to seeing you there. QP