“Desire for the Other: Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis In Conversation” was the latest in a series of collaborations between the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, NYU’s Post-Doctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and the journal Studies in Gender [...]]]> Desire for the Other: “Together and Separately”
New York University, 4 November 2011

“Desire for the Other: Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis In Conversation” was the latest in a series of collaborations between the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, NYU’s Post-Doctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality, with additional support from the NYU Humanities Initiative: Interdisciplinary Freud Reading Group. The series brings together clinicians and critical theorists, in order to “create shared conversations about, and against, psychoanalysis, as well as productively unsettle… received notions of what it means to be given into and by discourse,” according to CSGS director Ann Pellegrini, who introduced the event. The roundtable was organized around the recent volume With Culture In Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories, and the evening was moderated by Muriel Dimen, the book’s editor. Two contributors, Orna Guralnik and Eyal Rozmarin, presented selections from the volume, followed by responses from NYU faculty members Ben Kafka and Amber Musser.

Dimen described the decades-long development of the project, which had its roots in the mid-80s in a seminar at the NY Institute for the Humanities: as she said, “we are finally having the cross-disciplinary conversation we have always wanted to have, and it has taken this long to do it.” The essays in the collection “come out of a common history of research” in the joint between psychic and social theories of psychoanalysis, with a desire to develop a common vocabulary “between the clinical world and the academic world.” Many contributors to the volume traffic in both, with clinical and academic training.

Orna Guralnik started the roundtable with an excerpt from With Culture In Mind, in which she described a pivotal moment in a session with a patient, Grace. During the session, Grace wondered aloud “maybe I’m not really gay,” a question prompted by her ambivalent response to being hit on inappropriately by her straight male friend Joe. While Grace was flattered by Joe’s attention, Guralnik understood Joe’s actions to be unconsciously homophobic, his attempt to “straighten out the situation” and interpellate Grace into socially legible heterosexuality. Guralnik called this “one of those moments” in analysis, a “point of urgency,” in which analysts must make a choice with “profound implications” for their patient. In this particular moment, Guralnik described her choice as deliberately political, informed more by Judith Butler’s description of the “social death of delegitimization” than Freud’s theories of disassociation. She concluded with the sentiment: “in our offices we try to crack open new conditions of possibility,” a statement that also speaks to the evening’s organizing principle.

Eyal Rozmarin began his remarks “with Deleuze and Guattari in mind,” as he considered questions of kinship, real and imagined, particularly in an Israeli context haunted by the spectre of the Holocaust: how much influence do parents have on the choices their children make, and should parents try to persuade children against army service? These questions followed a session in which Rozmarin, as a “transferential father,” was confronted with one of the “realities of parenting,” namely, that social belonging or group identity often takes precedence over familial influence. In the session he discussed, which was also the focus of one of his essays in the volume, his patient, Asaf, whose grandfather survived Auschwitz and who himself joined the Israeli army as a teenager, expressed his support for and identification with the Israeli army. This exchange happened in January 2009, and, as Rozmarin noted, “Israel had just attacked Gaza.” This prompted an argument between Rozmarin and his patient Asaf (both of them Israelis who live in New York) about war, which ended with Asaf calling Rozmarin “crazy”—not an ideal transferential relationship. Reflecting on this session, Rozmarin argued that Asaf was “a hostage of ideology,” a state in which “to be means to belong,” and which lets us “avoid the crisis of identity without resolution.” Rozmarin acknowledged the loss and disorientation to be found outside of that belonging, while also arguing that such a feeling of belonging is perhaps what haunts us, as we search for the elusive “fantasy of personal happiness.” He ended with the provocation: “What might our lives be like if we are not the victims of our own history?”

Amber Musser took up the thread of kinship and belonging in her response, with the question, “how does kinship work with subjectivity?,” and presented the work of Frantz Fanon “as part of a lineage of thinking queer kinship,” in line with recent work by queer cultural theorists David Eng and Elizabeth Freeman. She argued that Fanon “allows us to theorize kinship as a feeling.” This is a move with both clinical and political utility, as it allows us to think about kinship outside of the bounds of nation and family and consider “subjectivity and pleasure” as “the stakes of belonging.” Musser’s presentation added a new question to Rozmarin’s: how we might “enlarge the possibilities” for other histories, other futures?

In the most contentious presentation of the evening, Ben Kafka confessed his critical attitude about With Culture in Mind’s championing of “the new psychoanalysis.” As he said, he is “not yet ready to abandon the old psychoanalysis.” He elaborated this with a championing of Freud, both broadly—“without Freud, no Adorno; no Lacan, no Althusser, no Foucault, no Badiou, no Butler”—and particularly in relation to ideology and interpellation. While he expressed his admiration and respect for the book’s project, agreeing that a conversation between theory and practice is crucial— “critical theory only becomes critical when it encounters psychoanalysis,” and it “only remains critical” so long as it continues to do so, he provocatively suggested—he also insisted that “psychoanalysis is at its best when it preserves the specificity of its object,” namely, the unconscious and its effects. He argued that interpellation is a function of the preconscious—Freud’s term—which is the “grey area” between conscious and unconscious, and “in which we can locate that place in us that is ready to respond to interpellation’s call.”

The roundtable concluded with a heated but productive disagreement between the panelists over the stakes of these terms, which Guralnik called a “territorial battle over the unconscious.” Guralnik responded to Kafka’s distinction between interpellation as unconscious or preconscious by arguing that “the claim that certain things belong to the domain of the unconscious” but that the sociopolitical belongs to the realm of the preconscious is “a little bit of a power move by psychoanalysis.” In other words, she understood Kafka’s reading of Freudian psychoanalysis as stating: “that’s not the unconscious hence that’s not our business.” Kafka responded that he didn’t consider this a power play, but rather an attempt to home in on “what’s true about the truth” of ideology and interpellation.

The fine points of the ensuing discussion took the better part of an hour, and involved all four panelists, Dimen, and several articulate audience members. As the clock ticked the end of the extended session for the forum, the disagreement was ultimately left tantalizingly unresolved, demonstrating both the difficulty of coming to a common conversation between theory and practices of psychoanalysis, and also the richness to be had in continued attempts.

–Julia DeLeon

Julia DeLeon is a PhD student in Performance Studies at NYU.

Read a review of this talk!

November 4, Friday 4 to 6 pm

13-19 University Place (map) Lecture room 102 (please note room change) between 8th Street and Waverly Place

Panelists include:

contributing authors Orna Guralnik and Eyal Rozmarin

Ben Kafka, Media [...]]]> a roundtable on the new book With Culture in Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories

Read a review of this talk!

November 4, Friday
4 to 6 pm

13-19 University Place (map)
Lecture room 102 (please note room change)
between 8th Street and Waverly Place

Panelists include:

contributing authors Orna Guralnik and Eyal Rozmarin

Ben Kafka, Media & History, NYU

Amber Musser, Draper Program, NYU

moderated by Muriel Dimen, Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, NYU

This panel continues the project of developing a shared vocabulary between clinical and cultural theorists. With Culture in Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories (Routledge, 2011) reflects a movement emerging in the psychoanalytic world in the wake of feminist, postmodernist, and queer theory, and of gender and race politics. Traditionally, analysts maintain a remote stance towards the social, and are inclined to privilege the wild unconscious as a private space. Not so the writers in this book, all of them analysts, who immerse themselves in the here and now of people’s lives, attempting to navigate the complexity of different paradigms held by psychoanalytic and other critical approaches. They begin with the premise that subjectivity – interior life – is steeped in socio-political forces, and work to demonstrate how this assumption enhances clinical technique.

On this panel, two of the authors — Orna Guralnik and Eyal Rozmarin — demonstrate how critical and cultural theory shapes their very clinical work, including their theses about desire and identity. They will show not only what the clinical experience is like, but how theory lives, how changes when it moves from textual to clinical practices. The psychoanalytic consulting room is a scene of address that requires a way of being with ideas that is continuously responsive to the enigma of the Other. This is theory in the making.

At this forum, Guralnik and Rozmarin will be joined in conversation by two university-based cultural theorists, both of whom are faculty members at New York University: Ben Kafka and Amber Musser. Kafka and Musser will engage with the new psychoanalysis from their own (inter)disciplinary perspectives to rethink how bodies take shape intersubjectively and in relation, as well, to such socio-cultural variables as gender, national origins, race, and sexuality. Along with moderator Muriel Dimen, a clinician who is also the editor of With Culture in Mind, the roundtable as a whole will indicate how theory and embodied subjects live and breathe in different and overlapping kinds of spaces.

This event is free and open to the public.  Venue is wheelchair accessible.  No RSVPs — seating is on a first-come basis.

For more information, please call CSGS at 212-992-9540 or email csgs(at)nyu.edu.

Facebook event page click here.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, NYU; Post-Doctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, NYU; Humanities Initiative: Interdisciplinary Freud Reading Group, NYU; and Studies in Gender and Sexuality

David Eng’s lecture—co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute, and the Department of East Asian Studies—was a long time coming, having been originally scheduled for last fall, in celebration of his most recently [...]]]> Reparations and the Human:
“Justice or Love”
New York University, 28 September 2011

David Eng’s lecture—co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute, and the Department of East Asian Studies—was a long time coming, having been originally scheduled for last fall, in celebration of his most recently published book The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy.

He began his talk, “Reparations and the Human,” with a warning that it was going to be a long one, and asked the audience for patience as he laid out the “very enormous territory” of his new book, instead of indulging in a belated book party for The Feeling of Kinship. Of course, he had no need to apologize, as the sneak peek he offered of the book was complex and engrossing, dense with theoretical insights, but also peppered with fascinating background details on his collaborations with therapist Shinhee Han and the progression of their work together, from their analysis of the intimate workings of racial melancholia to his current interest in what he calls “racial reparation” and the “evolution of the western liberal subject outside of any universal norms of the human.” His work with Han, which emerged out of clinical case studies, has shaped the direction of his new solo book, in which he is mapping a conjoined genealogy of “reparation” in its political and psychoanalytic registers.

Eng described this work-in-progress—centered on a trans-Pacific archive that includes the internment of Japanese Americans by the US government during World War II; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, particularly as described in John Hersey’s 1946 New Yorker essay, “Hiroshima”; and the contemporary legal claims of comfort women—as a narration of “an alternative story of reparations as a concerted moral response to violence and war,” after “the dissolution of and disillusionment with European Enlightenment.” Using the writings of “psychic wonder twins” John Locke and Melanie Klein, who together “bookend the Enlightenment project,” Eng argued for the ways in which the political and psychic workings of reparation “supplement one another in the framing of liberal humanism,” as well as in “colonial conquest”—projects that, as he posited, cannot be considered in opposition to one another.

Reparation is a “key term” in both political theory and psychoanalysis, and although its disparate functions and meanings in these fields are rarely considered in tandem, Eng presented an argument for the importance of a comparative reading in order to conceptualize both its psychic and social “potentials, as well as its limits and liabilities.” He argued that the concept of racial reparation “emerges from and is managed by both political and psychic genealogies” of reparation, in order to trace the erasure of the violence of reparation through the ghostly figure of “the Indian in the woods,” who emerges in both Locke’s and, surprisingly, Klein’s theories of reparation.

While Locke’s work, particularly in the second of his Two Treatises on Government, describes reparation as a logic of compensation in the wake of war and violence, in which the always-victorious victim of aggression is awarded “the spoils of war,” this logic breaks down around the “borders of liberal personhood, property and dominion” inherent in colonial violence. According to Locke’s rendering, the colonizer is never positioned as the aggressor, but always a victim of the “natives and brutes” who are “disqualified from legal personhood, rights, and sanctioned address.” In contrast to Locke’s political philosophy, Klein’s work on reparation is figured as an “experimental ethics” of interpersonal relationality, in which “morality and self-reflection are not the causes but rather the effects of reparation.” However, though Klein ostensibly presents reparation as the “preservation of love and ethical possibility,” her own turn to “the colonial theatre of the new world” presents colonial violence as an act of reparation between Europe as “mother” and her colonizing “infants,” excluding colonized populations from the reparative process entirely and instead rendering it as a process of love for the “self-same.” This “shocking” turn speaks to both the difficulty and importance of reading psychic theories of reparation, typically centered on the “charmed dyad” of mother and child, in a broader social sphere that is “defined by histories of colonial violence and nationalism.”

Eng presented his close readings of Locke and Klein as a means to consider the question of “who and what is worthy of care, of repair, redress, and reparation,” in order to write toward the concept of racial reparation as a way to imagine “a future worth living in,” both psychically and socially. Here’s hoping the book comes out soon.

–Julia DeLeon

Julia DeLeon is a PhD student in Performance Studies at NYU.

In today’s world, where warnings of the ‘obesity epidemic’ are regular front-page news, it is impossible to escape the ways in which ‘fat’ is culturally constructed as a ‘problem’ – even a crisis. Too much of this substance is regularly cited as unhealthy and [...]]]> Edited by Christopher E. Forth, Alison Leitch, and Samantha Murray

In today’s world, where warnings of the ‘obesity epidemic’ are regular front-page news, it is impossible to escape the ways in which ‘fat’ is culturally constructed as a ‘problem’ – even a crisis. Too much of this substance is regularly cited as unhealthy and unattractive, a claim that has fired the research agendas of epidemiologists, biologists, psychologists, and other social scientists who take ‘obesity’ as their object. Other researchers have sought to understand how perceptions of ‘fat’ have evolved historically and socially to become a source of ‘disgust’ and marginalisation across multiple gendered, raced and classed subjectivities. Scholars and activists who critically engage with fat stereotypes have addressed the visual concerns of size and beauty, but accord less attention to fat as a material substance that may have implications for the lived experience of corpulence both as an identity and as a way of being in the world. By drawing attention to the complex and often ambiguous material and experiential dimensions of fat, this cross-disciplinary collection sheds new light on a subject that has, to date, been occluded by contemporary preoccupations with fatness and thinness.

In addition to functioning as an adjective used to describe corpulent bodies, ‘fat’ is also a noun denoting a substance located within bodies as well as existing outside of them. Whether in a liquid state as oil and grease or in a solid form as lard, suet, or butter, fats can be derived from plant and animal sources to play a variety of roles in human culture. While fats have numerous practical applications in everyday life, for example, in nutrition, cooking, heating, healing, sealing and preserving, fats’ protean characteristics – their ability to readily change their form and appearance – excite the human imagination, often mobilizing other, more intense, symbolic and metaphoric associations across time and space. Linked in various contexts to ideas about fertility, vitality, increase, or transformation, fats and oils participate in the ambivalence that often attends such concepts: they are thus capable of eliciting reactions of pleasure and fascination as well as fear and disgust. The editors of this volume are interested in soliciting essays that speak to these issues. Given the ambivalence that bodily fat may occasion, we are invited to investigate the ways in which the materiality of fats and oils may also inflect cultural perceptions of corpulence. In this way, viewing ‘fat’ in terms of materiality and ambiguity introduces greater complexity into the cultural study of fat and body size.

This cross-disciplinary collection welcomes the contributions of anthropologists, critical and cultural theorists and archaeologists as much as classicists, historians, and scholars studying art, literature, and religion. Relevant topics may include, but are not restricted to, the following:

• Fats and oils in religious, medical, and/or culinary discourses and practices
• Anointing and smearing in ritual and artistic practice
• Symbols of fertility and decay
• The phenomenology of fat embodiment
• Theories of abjection and disgust
• The material and sensuous qualities of fats and oils
• Fat embodiment, pleasure and desire
• Embodiment and pleasurable eating
• Harvesting and employing human/animal fat
• Queering dominant readings of fat (as embodiment, experience or substance)

Interested authors are invited to submit paper proposals of roughly 250 words to Christopher Forth (cforth[at]ku.edu) by October 1. If accepted final submissions of no more than 8,000 words each (including abstract, notes, and references) must be submitted by early March 2012.

October 21 and [...]]]> MASCULINITY, COMPLEX

a two-day symposium with Jessica Benjamin, Justin Vivian Bond, Judith Butler, Anne Cheng, Nancy Chodorow, Ken Corbett, Muriel Dimen, Jan Gaboury, Katie Gentile, Virginia Goldner, Francisco Gonzalez, Adrienne Harris, Ben Kafka, Tony Kushner, Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Joe Rollins, Eyal Rozmarin, Avgi Saketopoulou, Gayle Salamon, Dean Spade, Warren Spielberg, Brett Stoudt

October 21 and 22, Friday and Saturday
2 to 8 pm and 10 am to 4 pm, respectively

REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED FOR THIS CONFERENCE. ONLY THOSE REGISTERED WILL GAIN ENTRANCE.

more info: masculinitycomplex.com

Masculinity has finally become a site of inquiry: a problem the way femininity has been regarded for nearly a century. Masculinity, Complex sets out to reflect on the history of masculinity as it became perplexed via psychoanalytic and cultural discourses. We have brought together a renowned group of scholars, clinicians and artists, and are looking forward to what promises to be a memorable conference.

CUNY Graduate Center
Elebash Recital Hall
365 Fifth Avenue
between 34th and 35th Streets

Co-sponsored by Studies in Gender and Sexuality; Gender Studies Program, John Jay College of Justice; Center for the Study of Women and Society, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University.

Read a review of this talk!

September 28, Wednesday 6:30 to 8 pm

David L. Eng, English, Comparative Literature, and Asian American Studies, University of Pennsylvania

This presentation explores the relationship between political and psychic genealogies of reparation. Reparation is a key term in [...]]]> REPARATIONS AND THE HUMAN

a lecture by David L. Eng

Read a review of this talk!

September 28, Wednesday
6:30 to 8 pm

David L. Eng, English, Comparative Literature, and Asian American Studies, University of Pennsylvania

This presentation explores the relationship between political and psychic genealogies of reparation. Reparation is a key term in political theory, but it is also a central concept in psychoanalysis (specifically object relations theory), yet the two are rarely discussed in relation to one another. In this talk, I will explore how political and psychic genealogies of reparation might supplement one another in theories of the human and discourses of human rights, while helping us to understand better the social and psychic limits of repairing war, violence, colonialism, and genocide. Specifically, I will trace a global genealogy of reparations from John Locke to Melanie Klein to twentieth-century Asia in order to rethink the concept’s transnational significance and the possibility of “racial reparation” in context of the trans-Pacific: the internment of Japanese Americans by the U.S. government during World War II; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ending that war; and contemporary legal claims by “comfort women,” young girls and women from Japan’s colonial empire conscripted by the imperial army into sexual slavery.

Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
41-51 East 11th Street, 7th Floor Gallery
between University Place and Broadway

This event is free and open to the public.  If you need wheelchair access, please let us know 24 hours in advance: 212-992-9540.

For more information about this event, please call CSGS at 212-992-9540.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute, and the Department of East Asian Studies.

February 15, Tuesday 8 to 10 pm

Avgi Saketopoulou, Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, NYU

Discussants:

Tavia Nyong’o, Performance Studies, NYU

Cleonie V. White, William Alanson White [...]]]> RACE DOES GENDER: BRAIDING CULTURAL THEORY AND CLINICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS

a clinical case study presented by Avgi Saketopoulou
with commentary by Tavia Nyong’o & Cleonie V. White

February 15, Tuesday
8 to 10 pm

Avgi Saketopoulou, Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, NYU

Discussants:

Tavia Nyong’o, Performance Studies, NYU

Cleonie V. White, William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis & Psychology

Psychoanalysis’s engagement with questions of racial difference has grown significantly in recent years. However, journeying even further into academic work on racialization and the power dynamics embedding it can deepen our understanding of — and clinical work — with racial embodiment. This forum brings together cultural theorists and clinical practitioners to think race, gender, and sexuality with – and against – psychoanalysis. The event is organized around a case study presentation by Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou, to be followed by commentary by Professor Tavia Nyong’o and Dr. Cleonie V. White. All three presenters are interested in what psychoanalysis might say to questions of racial and sexual difference and how gender and sexuality studies and critical race theory might speak back to clinical practice.

In her case study, Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou will present her work with DeShawn, a nine-year-old African-American transgendered inpatient. She will detail his daily life and treatment in order to track the progression of his therapy over the course of three years. The early part of his hospitalization focused mostly on his psychopathology and on his gender variance, which aroused significant unrest among clinicians and patient. This upset delayed a much-needed clinical engagement with race. As the work progressed, however, his blackness and the analyst’s own whiteness became central to the treatment, which enabled DeShawn to relate differently to his psychiatric illness and to come to a more fluid relationship to his complex gender. The entwinements of these discursive threads reverberated in the individual as well as in the milieu treatment, offering important lessons as to how race presses on gender and desire and underlining as well what is at stake when clinicians fail to adequately attend to racial trauma.

The different institutional and disciplinary locations of this forum’s three speakers promises a meaningful and lively exchange that crosses between race and gender as well as between the classroom and the clinic. There will be ample time for audience discussion after the formal presentations.

Lecture Room 102
13-19 University Place, 1st floor
between 8th Street and Waverly Place

Avgi Saketopoulou is an advanced psychoanalytic candidate at NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is a contributing editor in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, assistant editor in Psychoanalytic Dialogues and an adjunct clinical supervisor at Long Island University. Avgi conducts asylum evaluations for LGBTQ individuals and serves as an expert consultant on trauma for the Bronx Mental Health Court. She teaches and writes on gender, race and sexualities and is especially interested on issues around consent. Avgi is in private practice in NYC.

Tavia Nyong’o is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. The research interests of Tavia Nyong’o include the intersections of race and sexuality, visual art and performance, and cultural history. He teaches courses on black performance, the history of the body, and subcultural performance. His book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), investigates musical, aesthetic, and political practices that conjoined blackness and whiteness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the web editor of Social Text.

Cleonie White, Ph.D. is faculty and supervisor at the William Alanson White Institute for Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology, and the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies. She sits on the Editorial Board of Contemporary Psychonalysis, and is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Dr. White’s interests include issues peertaining to race, culture, and politics, to psychoanalysis in culture and politics, and to the body as carrier and witness to, cultural and political trauma. She maintains a private practice in New York City.

Co-sponsored by the Counterpublic Collective; the Gender Studies Program at John Jay College/CUNY; the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, NYU; Pride in Practice, a student group of the NYU Silver School of Social Work; and Studies in Gender and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis, Cultural Studies, Treatment, Research

This event is free and open to the public.  Venue is wheelchair accessible.  If you need sign language interpretation services or other accommodations, please let us know as soon as possible.

For more information, please call 212-992-9540 or email csgs(at)nyu.edu.

Rebecca Colesworthy, Draper Program in Humanities and Social Thought, NYU

December 7, Monday 12:30 to 1:45 PM

Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality 41-51 East 11th Street, Room 709 between University Place and Broadway wheelchair access at 85-87 University Place between 11th & 12th Streets

This talk proposes a connection between [...]]]>

Rebecca Colesworthy, Draper Program in Humanities and Social Thought, NYU

December 7, Monday
12:30 to 1:45 PM

Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
41-51 East 11th Street, Room 709
between University Place and Broadway
wheelchair access at 85-87 University Place between 11th & 12th Streets

This talk proposes a connection between the “modernist turn” in Anglo-American literature and the “return” of themes of the gift hailed by anthropologist Marcel Mauss in his 1924 essay, The Gift. Building on readings of novels by Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Stevie Smith, Colesworthy explores the ways in which theories of the gift, exchange, and subjective and symbolic “economies” help us to reevaluate the ethical and political stakes of modernism, while also suggesting that their texts make distinctively literary – and sometimes feminist – contributions to the largely androcentric interdisciplinary corpus inspired, at least in part, by Mauss’s essay. Not only do their novels demystify and enable us to think beyond the long-term limit of structuralist and psychoanalytic theories alike – that is, the “riddle of femininity” – but they also plot the conditions and conventions propitious for gifts with the potential to disrupt the social and sexual status quo, thus conjugating the challenges of literary innovation and social transformation.

Rebecca Colesworthy is an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in Literary Cultures at NYU’s John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Humanities and Social Thought. She received her B.A. in English and Women’s Studies from Brown University and her Ph.D. in English from Cornell University. Her research interests include Anglo-American and comparative modernism, gender and sexuality studies, and literary and critical theory. Her current project, “Modernism’s Gifts,” explores the relationship between modernist ethics and poetics by juxtaposing the work of Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Stevie Smith with theories of the gift and exchange drawn from the fields of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. In addition to completing articles on Jean Rhys and Jacques Lacan, she looks forward to undertaking her next project, which considers the ways in which various 20th-century writers reimagine the traditionally exceptional position of the feminine subject with respect to moral laws.

Part of the Brown Bag Lunch Series. Bring your own lunch – we’ll provide beverages!

This event is free and open to the public.  If you need sign language interpretation services or other accommodations, please let us know as soon as possible.

For more information, please call 212-992-9540 or email csgs@nyu.edu.

A roundtable discussion with contributors.

November 19, Thursday 7:30 PM

NYU 721 Broadway Riese Student Lounge

Featuring: José Esteban Muñoz, Ann Pellegrini, Lisa Duggan, Patricia Clough, John Andrews, and Janet Jakobsen.

Presented by Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory and the NYU Department of Performance [...]]]>

A roundtable discussion with contributors.

November 19, Thursday
7:30 PM

NYU
721 Broadway
Riese Student Lounge

Featuring: José Esteban Muñoz, Ann Pellegrini, Lisa Duggan, Patricia Clough, John Andrews, and Janet Jakobsen.

Presented by Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory and the NYU Department of Performance Studies