"What Is Sexual Difference Now?": A conversation with Elizabeth Grosz and Joan Copjec November 13, 2009

This event brings two leading theorists together with Minnesota faculty to discuss where the question of sexual difference stands today. Feminist theory has always held that "the body" comes in at least two, male and female, but there is productive disagreement as to what conceptual framework is best suited to address this difference. The debate on sexual difference has nonetheless a profound effect on practically all disciplines.

From the early 1990s, Elizabeth Grosz (Women's Studies, Rutgers University) pioneered the theorization of the body as explicit philosophical theme in feminist theory. In addition to gender and performance studies, her books have influenced anthropology, cultural studies, geography, and architecture. Interestingly for the symposium, Grosz gradually moved away from Lacan. She is now engaged in feminist re-readings of Deleuze, Bergson, Darwin, and Nietzsche, all of which are often placed at odds with Lacan's Kantian and Hegelian background.

As director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture and editor of many collections on film and psychoanalysis, Joan Copjec (English and Comparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo) is a leading psychoanalytical theorist in the United States. In a book of some years ago she provocatively asked to "imagine there is no woman", arguing for an ethical interpretation of Lacan through case studies in cinema and art. Copjec has been central to Anglophone cultural and critical theory with psychoanalytic inflections such as October and umbr(a), touching on issues from urban planning to war and theology.

Sponsored By: Institute for Advanced Study
Additional Sponsors: CLA Scholarly Events Fund
Department of Anthropology
Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
Department of English
Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies
Institute for Global Studies
Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science
Department of German at Macalester College and the Space and Place Research Collaborative.

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu/SexualDifference.php