Gender Institute research seminar and public lecture series

Posted on October 30, 2008
Filed Under Education, Feminism, London, Women's Event | Comments Off

2008/2009 Programme

Only confirmed seminars/public lectures are listed – everything is open to all with no reservations required. For further information please contact our academic events coordinator.
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Knowing What We Mean
Robyn Wiegman Professor, Women’s Studies and Literature Duke University
chair: Clare Hemmings
Monday 3 November 2008 6pm
Gi Research Seminar, New Theatre, East Building

Robyn Wiegman: I call these comments “Knowing What We Mean” as a meditative counter to the longer tradition in feminist theory that has sought to give meaning to what we know. So much second wave writing is haunted by the requirement to answer the question, “how do you know?” as if answering it will settle the profound difficulty that is the problem of being part of, constituted by and an effect of the very world we seek to comprehend. “How do you know” prove it! displaces the provisional ways in which meaning is something one seeks, but does not own or simply have. (And even when I think I know this or that, what makes me think that I know what it means?) This talk is less an argument than a meditation on the relationship between feminism and theory, and on the genre of writing, reading, and political investment that we now call feminist theory.
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Rights and the Fully Human Self
Jennifer Nedelsky Professor of Law University of Toronto
chair: Anne Phillips; discussant: Nicola Lacey
Thursday 6 November 2008 4pm
Gi Research Seminar (D311 Clement House)

Jennifer Nedelsky: The full dimensions of the human self—including our embodiedness, the role of affect in our cognitive capacities, and the ways in which relationships constitute our selves and enable our capacities—are necessary for identifying and institutionalizing the rights humans are entitled to. These dimensions of human self-hood cannot simply be relegated to other spheres of human endeavor and inquiry, because we cannot optimally understand what fosters core values such as autonomy without understanding the role of body, affect and relationship in the development of human capacities. If rights are to effectively articulate these values and serve to promote and protect them, our legal and political institutions must be designed with the fully human self in mind. Thus, the traditionally abstracted, disembodied rational agent should no longer be the model of the legal and political subject.

In particular, I argue that when the law uses a wider, relational conception of autonomy it can better assess the kinds of responsibility that should be assigned. Opening the conceptions of both autonomy and responsibility to variability and contingency poses formidable challenges to legal reasoning. I use the example of the Canadian legal response to “the battered women’s syndrome” to examine these challenges. I also argue that even an optimal conception of autonomy (as part of the capacity for creative interaction), cannot be the basis for equal rights. Because any empirical capacity will vary among individuals (and equality should not vary), we will still need a formal ground for equality. Equality thus requires a combination of a formal claim to equal moral worth and a contextual analysis of what can make that equality real for any given (affective, embodied, relational) person.
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Desiring Walls
Wendy Brown Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley
chair: Anne Phillips
Wednesday 12 November 6.30pm
Gendering the Social Sciences Public Lecture Hong Kong Theatre

In this lecture, Professor Wendy Brown will draw on discourse analysis, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory to examine the desire for walls in the context of eroding sovereignty.

Why the current proliferation of nation-state walls, especially amidst widespread proclamations of global connectedness and anticipation of a world without borders? And why barricades built of concrete, steel and barbed wire when threats to the nation today are so often miniaturized, vaporous, clandestine, dispersed or networked? Why walls now and how are they to be understood?

While acknowledging variety in the explicit purposes of the new walls, this project argues for comprehending the recent spate of wall building in terms of eroded nation-state sovereignty. As walls permit infiltration by much of what they formally interdict, confound the very distinction between law and lawlessness represented by the nation state, and both highlight and exacerbate tensions between global flows (of labor, goods, ideas, peoples, and finance) and national anxieties, walls also reveal a theological dimension of sovereignty, register theatrical and contradictory dimensions of sovereign decline, and project a (false and untenable) imago of sovereign power. Above all, the new walls consecrate the boundary corruption they overtly contest and signify the ungovernability by law of a range of forces unleashed by globalization.
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After the Good Life, the Impasse: Human Resources, Time Out, and the Precarious Present
Lauren Berlant George M. Pullman Professor University of Chicago
chair: Clare Hemmings; discussant: Sadie Wearing
4th February, 2009 6.30pm
Gendering the Social Sciences Public Lecture

Lauren Berlant: “After the Good Life” reads with two films of Laurent Cantet [Ressources humaines/Human Resources (1999) and L'Emploi du Temps/Time Out (2001)] to engage the new affective languages of the contemporary economic atmosphere, languages of anxiety, contingency, and precarity that take up the space where sacrifice, upward mobility, and meritocracy used to be. It is an inquiry into the affective conditions of the experience of the reproduction of life as an aesthetic development in the public sphere. Its aim is to produce better descriptions of the history of the present through attention to the filmic remediation of bodies circulating in social space; it argues for thinking about the present as an impasse no longer legitimated by alibis of the future, but by pressures of survival in a durational now. What happens to optimism when futurity splinters as a prop for getting through life? What happens when an older ambivalence about security (the Weberian prison of disenchanted labor) meets a newer ambivalence about it (it gets in the way of profit)? How to understand the emergence of this felt crisis, in relation to transformations of the good life fantasy? Its focus is on a variety of crises in the professional classes, which no longer can delegate precarity to the poor or the citizen sans papiers; its interest is in exploring how the new realism stages the end of an era of social obligation and belonging by focusing, microhistorically, on what happens to manner and manners.
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Hecklers to Power? The Waning Tools of Liberal Rights and Challenges to Feminist Activism in South Asia
Ratna Kapur Professorial Fellow, Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations and Director, Centre for Feminist Legal Research, New Delhi
chair: Sumi Madhok
11th March, 2009 6.30pm
Gendering the Social Sciences Public Lecture

Ratna Kapur: The lecture examines the specific challenges that have faced feminist activism in South Asia, and how it might forge a new political direction in a moment when the revolution lies in tatters. The lecture is divided into three parts. The first part addresses some of the primary assumptions on which feminist activism in South Asia has been based. I specifically focus on India, though the analysis shares some common features with feminist activism in other parts of South Asia. In the second part, I look at some of the challenges posed to feminist activism, at the national and international level, especially from sexual and religious minorities that appear to have imperilled rather than empowered the enterprise. In the third part, I set out how this demise is symptomatic of the waning tools of modernity. I focus on how the basic assumptions about the subject, history and progress on which the liberal project is based have been exposed as having an exclusive and non-revolutionary face. The lecture concludes with some reflections on how postcolonial feminism might assist in recovering the politics of transformation and restore feminism and feminist activism as both intellectually and politically viable.

Biographies http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/genderInstitute/biographies.htm

Check for updates and additions http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/genderInstitute/events/seminarseries08.htm