INTRODUCTION TO THE 2024 SEMINAR

The seminar of 2024 has been really particular. Never I have received as many candidatures  and never they were as few participants as this year. This was largely due to a problem with visas, which were requested too late, or to a problem regarding the cost of hospitality, although the researchers in PhD can obtain a grant to take part in the seminar if they demand it in time. Some difficulties have also resulted from changes in the persons responsible for the hospitality in Enclos Rey. Nevertheless, the seminar went well and the participants were very happy to have more time for each. As usually, the seminar has gathered researchers coming from different countries, continents and cultures, and with themes of research which differed from one another.

Emily Barber (University of Massachusetts)

In this paper, I show how I have leveraged Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of sexuate difference and her linguistic research on the sexuation of language to emphasize and distill the feminist elements of Isabel Allende’s short story “Dos Palabras.” Additionally, I envisage what translation decision can be made in order to translate the text into English in a language in the feminine. Read more…

Luara Karlson-Carp (University of Melbourne)

Throughout the history of philosophy and feminist theory, the subject has been viewed as being asexuate. Whether figured as the thinking “I” of metaphysics, disembodied and characterized by its nonsensuous and neutered nature, or more recently as the deconstructed “subject”, overdetermined by power-laden discourses, the subject has been consistently understood as sexuately neutral. This asexuate subjectivity has been presumed to condition any and all our sexuate experiences or identifications, and so sexuation has been consistently positioned “downstream” of the subject as one of its many constructions, whether the subject is conceived as a collection of innate ideal capacities given by God or nature, or as an empty form resulting from relational matrices that precede it. Read more…

Chris Ma (Villanova University)

In my essay, I consider the work of Luce Irigaray and ask: how can Irigaray’s work help us to challenge an oversimplified version of a biological determinism assuming that sexual difference is solely based on a biological dimorphism? How can we read Irigaray against this cisgenderism and explore other gendered possibilities? And why should we think of gender as different? Read more…

Carine Plancke (Centre for Research on Culture and Gender, Ghent University)

Over the last decades, sexually explicit images and the adoption of a “porn look” have become prevailing in Western culture and entail an increasing (self)-objectification of women. Critical reflections on this trend rely on ground-breaking work developed by feminist scholars since the 1970s. Luce Irigaray’s work ‘This sex which is not one’ (This Sex Which Is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 23-33, 1985) has had a major impact in this regard. In her criticism of psychoanalytic discourse she has highlighted how feminine sexuality is subjected to masculine parameters. What is required for the practice of masculine sexuality determines the way of conceiving of sexuality, which leaves women in a state of dependency, being objects that want to be appropriated and consumed by men. Read more…

Tjasa Skorjanc (University of Ljubljana)

To gain a living economy cannot amount to suddenly reach a autonomous existence and know, by some currents of our blood, how to live. Our birth and the later stages of our life bring us in always greater intricacies of relations which ought to develop a tactile relationship between the mother and the newborn. However, in societal and thinking developments and histories, the maternal and the tactile dimensions of such beginning of our life are not taken into consideration. Thispoint is important for certain sections of my PhD project, in which I explore the nexus between places, speed, and the relationship between touch and gaze. Read more…