A co-presentation of Gender Institute 2014 Public Lecture Series Feminist Theory Now and Queer Objects symposium

Please register online to attend

For readers uninitiated into the critical concerns of queer theory, the prospect of talking about queer sex might herald a thrilling departure from the conventions of everyday sexual and gender forms. Weird, wild, naughty, depraved: the  adjectives proliferate against a background drawn in muted tones: straight, domestic, uneventful, routine. But the stories that queer theory tells about the sex we might call its own are not always perversely pleasing. Whether in the language of “Is the Rectum  a Grave?”, No Future, Extravagant Abjection, or Sex, or the Unbearable, the field has shown a primary interest in the negativity of sex, not its lusty or liberatory redemption. This talk parses the analytic and political differences at stake in the ongoing debate about negativity, paying particular attention to the way that race has been figured as the decisive term for both valuing and rejecting negativity’s critical allure.

Professor of Literature and Women’s Studies at Duke University, Robyn Wiegman has published Object Lessons (2012) and American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (1995), and numerous anthologies, including Women’s Studies on Its Own (2002) and Feminism Beside Itself (1995). She is currently working on Arguments Worth Having, which locates points of critical dissension in contemporary encounters between feminist, queer, and critical race thinking.

Please direct all enquiries to Monique Rooney:

E Monique.Rooney@anu.edu.au

T (02) 6125 0531