Sexuate Subjects: Politics, Poetics and Ethics
Friday 3rd to Sunday 5th December 2010
This international interdisciplinary event will examine how political, poetic and ethical practice and thought engage with questions of sexuality and sexual difference on a global stage. At a time when women�s and
minority group rights are still frequently under-represented and marginalised in mainstream global discussions of citizenship and democracy, culture, health and community life, Sexuate Subjects responds to French thinker, Luce Irigaray�s theory of �sexuate difference� for enabling critically-aware global formations of self-identity and
community, art, architectural and spatial practices, ecology, environmental care and sustainability, health and bio-medically assisted life.
In particular, Sexuate Subjects will focus on these different relationships as they are expressed in political, poetic and ethical practice and thought in disciplines including: architecture, art, literature, modern languages, philosophy, the political and social sciences. By examining these complex expressions of our physical and
psychic lives through artefact, body, dialogue, image, installation and word, this event will provide a platform of diverse approaches which can help us build sexuate futures. Such approaches will contribute towards developing more nuanced understandings of the diversity of global cultures and their academic and public intersections. International experts from higher education, professional and public realms, as well as young researchers and practitioners, are invited to respond.
Key questions being discussed include:
Where are �global� women in contemporary approaches to health matters?
How are political, poetic and ethical issues addressed in feminist/feminine architectural and spatial practice?
How can sexuate ecologies and environmental practices inform global sustainability?
How can art inform conflict resolution?
Why poetry matters in thought, ethical and political life.
How can sexuate difference inform the ethics of global education?
How can feminist bio-ethics inform approaches to women�s and body-rights, fertility and population health?
The Conference is being developed in conjunction with UCL�s Grand Research Challenge Intercultural Interactions, the US-based Luce Irigaray Circle, and Fatale (Feminist Architectural Theory Analysis, Laboratory and Education) at KTH, Stockholm.
Confirmed keynote speakers:
Professor Elizabeth Grosz (Rutgers University, New Jersey)
Dr Doina Petrescu (Atelier d�Architecture Autog�r�e and the University of Sheffield)
FATALE Prof Katja Grillner, Dr Meike Schalk, Dr Katerina Bonnevier (KTH Stockholm)
The Karen Burke Memorial Lecture (sponsored by the Luce Irigaray Circle)
Call for Paper requirements:
Please find specific details of submissions and convenor contact details in each panel description listed below. For general enquiries about the event please email Peg Rawes on m.rawes@ucl.ac.uk. Full registration details will be confirmed by July 2010. We are making every effort to keep registration fees to an absolute minimum for all, however, if necessary we may need to ask attendees (excluding students) whose conference attendance
is financially supported by their institution for a registration fee (under �100).
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Panel: Whirlwinds
Convenors: Professor Jane Rendell (UCL), Dr Penelope Haralambidou (UCL) and Dr Ana Araujo (UCL/ University of the Arts, London).
It is already getting around � at what rate? in what contexts? in spite of what resistances? � that women diffuse themselves according to modalities scarcely compatible with the framework of the ruling symbolics. Which doesn�t happen without causing some turbulence, we might even say whirlwinds, that ought to be reconfined within solid walls of principle, to keep them from spreading to infinity. Otherwise they might even go so far as to disturb that third agency designated as the real � a transgression and confusion of boundaries that it is important to restore to their proper order.
Luce Irigaray, �The �Mechanics� of Fluids�, This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, [1977], 1985), 106.
It is over 30 years since the publication of This Sex Which Is Not One by the influential French thinker and writer Luce Irigaray. Her political writing on sexual subjectivities and spatialities has had a remarkable influence on feminist theory and practice in architecture and the spatial arts.
The chaotic nature of the contemporary context positions the term �whirlwinds� in an already turbulent scene. We are surrounded by disasters � environmental, economic and political � some actual, others immanent �
the so-called �war on terror�, climate change, peak oil and the �credit crisis�. What kind of response is feminism capable of making today?
This is a call to those whose work has responded, however tangentially, to the themes and issues of sexual ethics and difference raised by Irigaray and her understanding of the experiential, material and conceptual
construction of space.
We are looking for works (300 words plus up to 3 images), which articulate the production of a particularly feminine or feminist space-time as a way of responding to current conditions. The proposal needs to be defined in
terms of intention, location, duration, interaction and materiality: it could be an intervention, a paper, a reading, a performance, an exhibit, a workshop, a walk.
There are two parameters:
* a time: the proposal must outline how the work will take place within a specific time-frame: 10am to 5pm on 3 December 2009.
* a space: the proposal must outline how the work will take place within the institutional space of the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL which includes an educational site (a lecture theatre with a flat floor, no fixed seating and one-way basic projection, potentially two screen), and a foyer exhibition space which also operates as a passage from the front door of the Bartlett School of Architecture past lifts and doors to various lecture theatres, studios, with some window space and glass fa�ade to the street.
There are two conditions:
* Those proposing works are responsible for obtaining the funding for making, exhibiting and transporting themselves and their work to the venue.
* The exact presentation of the work will be decided in negotiation with the conference team, who will make the final decision in the last instance.
Submission requirements: By 5th March 2010 please send a 300 word proposal and up to 3 images to a.araujo@ucl.ac.uk for blind review, in 2 documents: a proposal + image document (word/PDF), plus a name/affiliation/30 word bio document (word/PDF).
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Panel: Understanding Difference: why poetry matters
Convenors: Professor Timothy Mathews (UCL), Dr Sharon Morris (UCL).
Luce Irigaray�s feminism urges us to believe in the power we have as individuals as well as communities to reorganize our lives on the basis of mutual understanding rather than conflict. As sexuate subjects, for Irigaray we have the uniquely human opportunity to understand each other in terms of what divides and separates us. Sexual difference is insurmountable, our bodies speak this truth to anyone who will hear. But sexual difference, specifically, fundamentally, allows human interaction of respect, rather than domination, appropriation or assimilation. Her work distinguishes itself from the other major theorists of her generation, especially in French, in refuting notions of an inevitable pull, both ideological and psychoanalytical, to one-ness, to cultural and
institutional narcissism in all its forms. Nor does Irigaray accept a purely metaphysical account of difference which deprives it of the living, bodily reality of sexed, human relations. Her understanding of sexual difference and sexuate being has the power to reorientate social interaction towards freedom and understanding, in domains including education, the environment, architecture, cultural and inter-cultural relation as well as the loving relation itself. But it is an understanding which depends on nurturing a poetic way of thinking, hearing, seeing, feeling; depends on it, calls on it, requires it, reminding people all the time of their capacity for it. If sexual difference is a given, existentially, biologically, then the freedom it affords us is also beyond our understanding, beyond our capacity to see beyond our own body. And still we know the difference separating men and women.
Poetry allows that difference we know but cannot grasp to be understood; not only understood, but shared. This strand will delve into the power of poetry to create understanding of what lies beyond the understanding of
any one person, thinker, practitioner. It will engage with the poetic qualities of Irigaray�s own writing: the unique rhetoric of her theory and its ways of engaging with readers; and the voice of her own poetry. It will also engage with the experiences of translation: inter-lingual translation, as well as the light translation can shed on the passages from bodily to verbal experience. It will also explore the necessary part of poetry in the work of other theorists and thinkers of the human.
Papers, poetry performance and fine art proposals (including moving image, installation) are invited from scholars and practitioners that address: the poetic qualities of thought itself; the movement of thought; the mobility of the ways in which difference is represented and understood. Work on poetry in thought about difference will be showcased alongside the work of creative artists addressing sexuate being in their practice: in their materials, in their ways of engaging with viewers or readers.
Submission requirements: By 5th March 2010 please email
t.mathews@ucl.ac.uk and sharon.morris@ucl.ac.uk a 300-500 word abstract in a proposal document (word/PDF), and a second name/affiliation/30 word bio document (word/PDF) for blind review. For performance and fine art responses please note: respondents are responsible for obtaining the funding for making, exhibiting and transporting themselves and their work to the venue, and the exact presentation of the work will be decided in negotiation with the convenors, who will make the final decision in the last instance.
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Panel: Lot�s Wife: The imperatives of disobedience and the spectacle of violence.
Convenor: Tamar Garb (UCL)
When Lot�s wife disobeyed the patriarchal injunction against looking back at the destruction of Sodom, she was punished by being turned into a pillar of salt. In a way, one might argue, she became the phallic substitute for the law she flouted. Whether conceived as an ossified tear � the weeping of women has often been used to symbolise grief, loss and mourning � or a memorial to an obliterated past, the question of women�s position in relation to violence is posed by this episode from Genesis.
It begs many questions:
Why did Lot�s wife (who is never named for herself but only in relation to her husband) look back, why was she punished, what did she see, why was the punishment ossification and what informed her view of the destruction
of her home? Central to this biblical narrative is the question of women�s relationship to violence and loss.
The turning to look of Lot�s wife is an act of disobedience which resulted in death. There are many myths and narratives which end in such punishment. Helene Cixous, for example, narrates in �Castration or Decapitation� a Chinese story about the beheading of a woman who laughs in the face of military discipline. The price of non-conformity to languages, behavioural codes and dominant injunctions can and has been annihilation.
And yet, women as agents � artists, critics, writers � have and continue to address the question of violence and conflict from their positions as women, despite the cost. What is the responsibility of women to �look back� as well as �sideways�, to narrate stories which counter dominant narratives and to imagine languages which transgress conventional borders and boundaries, the sites of conflict and oppression? How can or have women�s critical and creative energies been harnessed to confront anger, guilt, shame and aggression? How can art and newly imagined poetic/formal languages provide a way out of the impasse of political conflict?
These are the questions this panel will address � looking in particular at the recent past in Africa (South Africa and Rwanda offer particular instances of retrospection, reconciliation and reflection) and the Middle East, in particular the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine. Papers that address these localities from a feminist perspective will be welcomed. Women�s relationship to conflict and the role of art and poetics in making sense of and shifting our understanding of present and past acts of aggression and violation will be the subject of this panel.
Submission requirements: 300-500 word abstracts that address these themes are invited by 5th March 2010. Please email t.garb@ucl.ac.uk one proposal document (word/PDF), and a second bio/affiliation/30 word bio document (word/PDF) for blind review.
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Panel: Sexuate sustainable practices and ecologies
Convenors: Dr Peg Rawes (UCL), Professor Gail Schwab (Hofstra University, NY)
To construct only in order to construct nevertheless does not suffice for dwelling. A cultivation of the living must accompany a building of that which does not grow by itself...For a human, the two do not seem separable. To cultivate human life in its engendering and its growth requires the elaboration of material and spiritual frameworks and constructions. These should not be opposed to the becoming of life, as they have too often been, but provide it with the help indispensable for its blossoming. Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love (New York: Continuum, 2002), 144.
Ecological thinking is not simply thinking about ecology or about the environment: it generates revisioned modes of engagement with knowledge, subjectivity, politics, ethics, science, citizenship, and agency, which pervade and reconfigure theory and practice alike. First and foremost a thoughtful practice, thinking ecologically carries with it a large measure of responsibility. . . . [As to] how it could translate into wider issues of citizenship and politics, . . . the answer, at once simple and profound, is that ecological thinking is about imagining, crafting, articulating, endeavoring to enact principles of ideal cohabitation. Lorraine Code, Ecological Thinking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 24.
Luce Irigaray�s �sustainable� thinking and Lorraine Code�s ecological thought highlight the importance of developing sexuate futures through sustainable modes of social, poetic and political practice and theory.
Taking the terms �sustainability� and �ecology� to encompass the complex social, political and cultural formation of our environments, societies and futures, as well as the physical consequences of human interaction with biological, animal and environmental realms, this panel will explore how sexual difference can aid our responsibility for nurturing the sustainable ecologies of our local and global communities, environments and interactions; our health and well-being; the impact and expressions of social justice and citizenship; and our public and private poetic lives. It will examine the �eco-subjects� (Conley, 1997) which sexed ecological and sustainable thinking and practice bring to these debates, for example: What new eco-subjects and political imaginations does sexuate thinking enable? What new sexed models of ecology can enable sustainable modes of
living that nurture and generate our poetic, political and ethical lives? How do sexed approaches to sustainability transform it from its association with the damaging globalisation of technological and economic monocultures into new productive ethical models of ecological thinking? How can positive and cautionary sexuate eco-imaginations, narratives and poetics enable processes of social justice and political change for environmental and human sustainability?
Responses to these questions are invited from across the humanities, visual arts and design disciplines, the social sciences and the biomedical and physical sciences, as well as from individuals, collectives and organisations that research and practice in these issues. Disciplinary and interdisciplinary research and practices that demonstrate how poetic and political sexed thinking can inform new modes of sustainable ecologies are particularly welcomed. Approaches may include:
- ecocriticsm and ecofeminism
- social justice and ecological activism
- sustainable psycho-physical ecologies and approaches to mental health well-being
- sexuate approaches to biomedical research and practice, including, synthetic biology, epigenetics, family planning, women�s and child health
- micro-economics
- sexuate technologies
Submission requirements: By 5th March 2010 please email m.rawes@ucl.ac.uk
with a 300-500 word abstract in a proposal document (word/PDF), and a second name/affiliation/30 word biographical document (word/PDF) for blind review.
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Panels: Open call for panels/papers
Convenors: The Luce Irigaray Circle
The Irigaray Circle announces its Fifth Annual Conference hosted by the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. The Circle invites submissions that are inspired by or engaged with any aspect of Irigaray�s work. We welcome
submissions from all disciplines.
Possible themes include
� The history of philosophy
� Epistemology
� Ethics
� Ecology, environmental ethics, and sustainability
� Architecture and the built environment
� Political theory
� Multiculturalism
� Psychoanalysis
� Bioethics
� Medicine, health, and the body
� Language, literature, and the arts
The deadline for the submission of full papers is April 1, 2010.
(Abstracts will not be considered for review.) Notifications will be sent no later than May 15, 2010.
Papers should not exceed 3000 words (reading time 20 minutes), should include an abstract of less than 200 words, and should be prepared for blind review. Please remove all identifying remarks from the paper itself
and submit it electronically in .rtf or .doc format to irigaray06@gmail.com, along with a file containing your name, professional affiliation, contact information, and your paper title. The Program Committee welcomes proposals for panels, however, these must be accompanied by complete papers and each paper will be reviewed
individually. Please note that, as usual, the Irigaray Circle plans a volume based on the conference proceedings and reserves the right of first refusal on all papers presented at the conference. For further information on the conference or to join the Irigaray Circle please consult the website at www.irigaray.org or contact the Circle at
irigaray06@gmail.com. Submission Requirements: By 1st April 2010. Papers should not exceed 3000
words (reading time 15-20 minutes maximum), should include an abstract of less than 200 words, and should be prepared for blind review. Please remove all identifying remarks from the paper itself and submit it
electronically in .rtf or .doc format to irigaray06@gmail.com, along with a file containing your name, professional affiliation, contact information, and your paper title.
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Lecture: The Karen Burke Memorial Prize
The Irigaray Circle invites submissions for The Karen Burke Memorial Prize. The award honors our late colleague Karen Burke, who was a gentle philosopher and founding member of the Luce Irigaray Circle. The award recognizes excellent work by a graduate student on or inspired by Luce Irigaray. In addition to receiving a prize of $500, the winner will present the third annual Karen Burke Memorial Lecture at the 2010 meeting
of the Luce Irigaray Circle at UCL, December 3-5, 2010.
We invite papers from all disciplines that engage with any aspect of Irigaray's work, such as:
� The history of philosophy
� Epistemology
� Ethics
� Ecology, environmental ethics, and sustainability
� Architecture and the built environment
� Bioethics
� Medicine, health, and the body
� Political theory
� Multiculturalism
� Psychoanalysis
� Language, literature, and the arts
Submission requirements: All applicants must be enrolled as graduate students as of June 2010.
� Papers should be no more than 4,000 words and prepared for anonymous review.
� Applicants should submit papers as an email attachment to irigaray06@gmail.com in .doc or .rtf format, with the subject line �Burke Prize�
� Papers should be accompanied by an email listing the paper title and the
applicant�s name, affiliation, and email address.
� Deadline for submissions: June 15, 2010
Dr. Peg Rawes
Senior Lecturer
Departmental Tutor
Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
22 Gordon Street, London. WC1H 0QB
Tel +44 (0)20 7679 1025
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