Critical Theory & Sexuality Studies
Information
- Location:
- Dublin, Ireland
Events
1 upcoming eventSee All
- Organising the Postsurgical In...
University of Limerick, Ireland
Thursday, March 4 at 2:00pm
The(e)ories
SEDUCTION INTO READING: Bracha L. Ettinger's The Matrixial Borderspace
http://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/documents/Gi
www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk
The(e)ories
Special feature on the work of psychoanalyst, psychologist, philosopher and artist Bracha L. Ettinger, eds. Noreen Giffney, Anne Mulhall & Michael O'Rourke, in the current issue of Studies in the Maternal: http://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/ettinger.htm
www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk
Studies in the Maternal is an international, peer-reviewed, scholarly online journal. It aims to provide a forum for contemporary critical debates on the maternal understood as lived experience, social ...
The(e)ories
After the End: Medieval Studies, the Humanities and the Post-Catastrophe (1st Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group)
University of Texas at Austin, 4-6 November 2010
CALL FOR PAPERS
www.siue.edu
[co-organized by postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, the University of Texas at Austin, and the BABEL Working Group]
The(e)ories Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London), speaker at the Posthumanism and Enhancement: Bioethics in the Age of New Media intensive seminar at the University of Limerick, Ireland (19 November 2009), pictured with Noreen Giffney (University of Limerick) and Eoin Devereux (University of Limerick). The seminar fo...rmed part of Gender, Culture & Society Seminars @ UL.
The(e)ories
JUST PUBLISHED! The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory [Queer Interventions book series] (Ashgate 2009), eds. Noreen Giffney and Michael O'Rourke. 30 chapters, all commissioned. Introduction, table of contents and index available at http://www.ashgate.com/queerintervention
The(e)ories
A special issue on queer theory and the philosopher, Jacques Ranciere, edited by Michael O'Rourke and Samuel Chambers. Check it out here:
http://www.borderlands.net.au/issues/vol
www.borderlands.net.au
Jacques Rancière on the Shores of Queer Theory Editors: Samuel A. Chambers and Michael O'Rourke
The(e)ories Anyone for the Commemorating Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick seminar in Dublin next Saturday (7 November)?
The(e)ories If you could attend one intenisive seminar on a recently-published book in queer theory, which book would you choose?
The(e)ories Speakers at the Gender, Sexuality and Theories of Image day-long seminar at the University of Limerick, Ireland (15 October 2009): Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge), Linda Williams (University of California, Berkeley), Griselda Pollock (University of Leeds) and Michael O'Rourke (Independent Coll...eges, Dublin). The seminar formed part of Gender, Culture & Society Seminars @ UL
The(e)ories 2010 marks twenty years of queer theory (since Teresa de Lauretis used the term at a conference she organised in 1990). What do you consider to be the most important texts published in the 'field'?
The(e)ories
Gender, Culture & Society Seminars @ UL Present:
POSTHUMANISM & ENHANCEMENT: BIOETHICS IN THE AGE OF NEW MEDIA
DR JOANNA ZYLINSKA (Goldsmith’s College, University of London)
THURSDAY 19 NOVEMBER 2009, 2-4.30 pm
This seminar is hosted by Women’s Studies @ UL
Description:
The problem of human enhancement occupies a prominent p...lace not only in various academic disciplines — philosophy, sociology, media and cultural studies – but also in wider public debates about ‘our human futures’ and the direction of their transformation. Mobilising, unsurprisingly perhaps, experts and non-experts alike, this problem is usually articulated via two sets of questions: moral questions over the permissibility, extent and direction of enhancement, and technical questions over of the feasibility of different forms of alterations to human bodies and minds. My presentation postulates that none of the dominant positions on enhancement within the field of bioethics is entirely satisfactory due to a limited, monadic, pre-technological and non-cultural model of the human in these models. It takes on both critics of extension (e.g. Habermas) and their proponents (Harris, Agar, Bostrom, Savulescu, Dworkin). Developing further some of the ideas raised in my monograph, Bioethics in the Age of New Media (MIT Press, 2009), it proposes in response a new non-normative bioethics that sees its human and non-human subject as always already enhanced, and hence dependent, relational and co-evolving with technology. This position will not be used to justify the ‘anything goes’ approach to biological or technical intervention into the human or animal body – but rather to outline a more responsible ethics of enhancement.
My focus in this presentation is not therefore on how much we can or should enhance, and by what means. Instead, I pose the following questions:
(1) What kind of ethical framework would we need to adopt if we were to concede that enhancement is inherent, rather than external, to human existence?
(2) Even if enhancement as such is inherent to humans, are all kinds of enhancement to our bodies and minds equally desirable from the perspective of cultural and gender politics?
Chapter for Discussion:
Delegates should read the following chapter in preparation for this seminar. Copies are available from noreen.giffney@ul.ie
Joanna Zylinska, ‘Bioethics: A Critical Introduction’ in Bioethics in the Age of New Media (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press 2009), pp. 3-34.
Seminar Schedule:
2.00 Posthumanism & Enhancement (Dr Noreen Giffney, Women’s Studies, Department of Sociology, University of Limerick)
2.30 Posthumanism & Enhancement: Bioethics in the Age of New Media (Dr Joanna Zylinska, Goldsmiths, University of London)
3.00 Informal response by Dr Eoin Devereux (Head of Department of Sociology, University of Limerick)
3.10 Informal response by Odette Clarke (Women’s Studies, Department of Sociology & Department of History, University of Limerick)
3.20 Short break
3.30 Discussion of presentation and required reading
4.30 Thanks and end of seminar
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.
Respondents:
Eoin Devereux is Senior Lecturer and Head of Department in the Department of Sociology University of Limerick. He is the author of Understanding The Media 2nd edition (2007) and the editor of Media Studies: Key Issues and Debates (2007) – both published by SAGE (London). His current research projects include work on Morrissey’s Latino fans and he has recently published an essay ‘I'm not the man you think I am: Authenticity, Ambiguity and the cult of Morrissey’ in E. Haverinen, U. Kovala and V. Rautavuoma (eds) Cult, Community, Identity. Research Center for Contemporary Culture of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland (2009).
Odette Clarke is a PhD candidate in gender history and a teaching assistant in Women’s Studies at the University of Limerick. Her PhD research is on the ego-documents of Caroline Wyndham-Quin, countess of Dunraven (1790-1870) and her research interests are nineteenth-century constructions of gender, emotions in history, religion as a constitutive discourse and intra-familial power relationships. Her pedagogical interests include feminist and gender theory and historiography. Odette has a BSc in Applied Biological Sciences from Manchester Met where her final year project was in computational chemistry.
Registration:
Everyone is welcome but pre-registration is necessary. Please note there are a limited number of places available so early registration is advised. To register and for further information, contact Dr Noreen Giffney, Women’s Studies, Department of Sociology: noreen.giffney@ul.ie
GENDER, CULTURE & SOCIETY SEMINARS @ UL
This event forms part of the new Gender, Culture & Society seminar series at the University of Limerick. The Gender, Culture & Society (GCS) seminar series 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. Seminar themes include: posthumanism and bioethics, intersex, theories of embodiment, queer theory, theories of the image, masculinities, gender and sexuality in clinical psychoanalysis, and critical theory and the maternal. The emphasis is on discussion. For further details, contact Dr Noreen Giffney, Women’s Studies, Department of Sociology: noreen.giffney@ul.ie See http://www.ul.ie/womensstudies for a list of upcoming events in the series.
Time:2:00PM Thursday, November 19th
Location:University of Limerick, Ireland
The(e)ories PUBLISHED IN A FEW WEEKS Post-Queer Politics [Queer Interventions book series] (Ahgate 2009) by David V. Ruffolo. Table of contents, series editors' preface (TwO [Theory without Organs]) and index online at www.ashgate.com/queerinterventions
The(e)ories JUST PUBLISHED Somatechnics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies [Queer Interventions book series] (Ashgate 2009), eds. Nikki Sullivan & Samantha Murray. Table of contents, introduction and further details online at www.ashgate.com/queerinterventions
The(e)ories COMING SOON: Check out the new, revamped The(e)ories wesbite at http://www.normick.com Further information about upcoming and previous events, the Queer Interventions book series and the Cultural Connections: Key Thinkers and Queer Theory book series.
RECENT ACTIVITY
The(e)ories discussed 2010: 20 Years of Queer Theory: Most Important Texts for You? on the The(e)ories discussion board.
