Gender, Culture & Society Seminars @ UL

2009 - 2010

The Gender, Culture & Society (GCS) seminar series at the University of Limerick, Ireland, runs in tandem with the new MA in Gender, Culture and Society, convened by Women’s Studies in the Department of Sociology. GCS aims to revisit debates within gender and sexuality studies in order to celebrate, challenge and rethink them by pushing the field in new directions. GCS is committed to supporting highly theoretical work and pioneering efforts in the areas of gender and sexuality. All speakers are invited and include thinkers whose work has had or will have a formidable influence on the development of critical theory and gender and sexuality. The emphasis is on discussion.

October

Theories of the Image

An intensive seminar with Dr Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge), Professor Griselda Pollock (University of Leeds) and Professor Linda Williams (University of California, Berkeley)

15 October 2009, 9.30 am-5.30 pm

Speakers

Patricia MacCormack is Reader in English Communication Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She has published extensively on Continental philosophy, perversion, transgression, body modification, the post-human and extreme cinema. She is the author of Cinesexuality (2008) co-editor of The Schizoanalysis of Cinema (2008) and has had recent publications appear in Deleuze and Queer Theory (2009) and Queering the Non/Human (2008).

Griselda Pollock is Professor of the Social and Critical Histories of Art in the School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies and Director for the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CATH) at the University of Leeds. She is the author, editor or co-editor of a significant number of books, including Millet (1977); Vincent van Gogh (1978); Mary Cassatt (1980); Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (1981); The Journals of Marie Bashkirtseff (1985); Framing Feminism: Art & the Women’s Movement 1970-85 (1987); Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art (1992); Dealing with Degas: Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision (1992); Avant-Garde Gambits: Gender the Colour of Art History (1993); Generations and Geographies: Critical Theories and Critical Practices in Feminism and the Visual Arts (1996); Differencing the Canon: Feminism and the Writing of Arts Histories (1999); Looking Back to the Future: Essays by Griselda Pollock from the 1990s (2000); Work and the Image (2 vols, 2000); Psychoanalysis and the Image (2006); Encountering Eva Hesse (2006); Museums after Modernism (2007); Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive (2006); he Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference (2007); Conceptual Odysseys: Passages to Cultural Analysis (2007) and Bluebeard’s Legacy: Death and Secrets from Bartók to Hitchcock (2009).

Linda Williams is Professor in the Departments of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include a psychoanalytic study of Surrealist cinema, Figures of Desire (1981), a co-edited volume of feminist film criticism Re-vision (1984), an edited volume on film spectatorship, Viewing Positions (1993) and Reinventing Film Studies (co-edited with Christine Gledhill, 2000). In 1989 she published a study of pornographic film entitled Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (second edition 1999). This study of moving-image pornography looks seriously at the history and form of an enormously popular genre. In 2001 she published Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White, from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson, an analysis of racial melodrama spanning the 19th and 20th centuries of American culture. She has also edited a collection of essays on pornography, Porn Studies (2004). Her most recent book is Screening Sex (2008), a history of the revelation and concealment of sex at the movies.

November

Posthumanism: Bioethics in the Age of New Media

An intensive seminar with Dr Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London)

19 November 2009, 1.30-4 pm

Speaker

Joanna Zylinska is a cultural theorist writing on new technologies and new media, ethics and art. She is a Reader in New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. The author of The Ethics of Cultural Studies (Continuum 2005) and On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared: the Feminine and the Sublime (Manchester University Press 2001), she is also the editor of The Cyborg Experiments: the Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, a collection of essays on the work of performance artists Stelarc and Orlan (Continuum 2002) and co-editor of Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust (University of Nebraska Press 2007). Zylinska’s third monograph is Bioethics in the Age of New Media (The MIT Press 2009). This project is informed by the philosophy of Levinas, Derrida, Stiegler, Focault, Agamben and Butler, ‘cyberfeminist’ approaches to technology as well as the latest experiments in robotics, biotechnology, bioart and aesthetic surgery. She is Reviews Editor for Culture Machine, an international open-access journal of cultural studies and cultural theory. Zylinska also combines her philosophical writings with photographic art practice. She brings together old and new photographic techniques with a view to creating images that creatively remediate the history of photography as well as its yet uncertain future.

February

Zones of Loss: Organising the Postsurgical Intersex Body

Intensive seminar with Dr Iain Morland (Cardiff University)

Speaker

Iain Morland is a lecturer in cultural criticism at Cardiff University. His research interests are gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies of science, narratology, psychoanalysis and critical theory. Iain has published widely on the ethics, theory and psychology of intersex in interdisciplinary journals such as Textual Practice, Continuum and Feminism & Psychology. He is editor (with Annabelle Willox) of Queer Theory (Palgrave Macmillan 2005) and editor of a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5:2 (Duke University Press 2009) titled ‘Intersex and After’.

March

Discourses of Embodiment: Reading Susie Orbach’s Bodies

Friday, 19 March 2010
10:30 am - 5:30 pm
Wood Room
Plassey House
University of Limerick

A one-day intensive seminar with Dr Susie Orbach (Psychoanalyst, Writer and The New School for Social Research, New York)

Speaker

Susie Orbach is a psychoanalyst and writer. She co-founded The Women’s Therapy Centre in 1976 and The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute, a training institute in New York, in 1981. Her interests as a psychotherapist and writer have centred around feminism and psychoanalysis, counter-transference, psychoanalysis and the public sphere, the construction of femininity and gender, globalisation and body image and emotional literacy. Her numerous publications include the classic, Fat is a Feminist Issue, along with such other influential texts as Hunger Strike and The Impossibility of Sex. Her latest book, Bodies, was published in January 2009. Susie is Visiting Scholar at The New School for Social Research in New York, was a Visiting Professor at LSE for 10 years and has been a consultant to the World Bank, the NHS and Unilever. She was a board member of The International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, is currently chair of the Relational School in the UK, is convener of Anybody, campaigning for body diversity and has a clinical practice seeing individuals and couples.

April

Performing Male Trouble

Intensive seminar with Dr Fintan Walsh (TCD)

22 April 2010
Time and location: TBC

Speaker

Fintan Walsh completed his PhD in the Samuel Centre, Trinity College Dublin, where he teaches. His research interests include queer theory, performance and cultural studies and he has published widely on these topics. He is the author of Male Trouble (Palgrave Macmillan 2010) and the co-editor of Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2009) and Queer Notions (Carysfort 2010).

May

Mum's the Word: Reading Lisa Baraitser’s Maternal Encounters:
The Ethics of Interruption (2009)

Two-day intensive seminar with Dr Lisa Baraitser (Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist & Birkbeck, University of London)

Thursday, 13 - Friday, 14 May 2010
Location: TBC

Speaker

Lisa Baraitser is Lecturer in the School of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London and a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Her research interests are in gender and sexuality, motherhood, feminist epistemologies, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and philosophies of ethics, affect and event. Her recent work has centred on the fraught relations, as well as creative tensions, between motherhood, female subjectivity and ethics. It spans an inter-disciplinary arena that takes in contemporary debates in relational, post-Kleinian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminism, the ethics of care, philosophies of otherness and event, phenomenology, and the use of autobiographical writing as a feminist research strategy. Her work draws on clinical experience gained from working therapeutically with mothers in a psychoanalytic psychotherapy service for women in North London, and she has published clinical papers on psychotherapeutic interventions with this client group. Her monograph, Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (Routledge 2009), draws together this work.