[csaa-forum] Remembering Eve Sedgwick - details and RSVPs

[Melissa Gregg]

Please find below full abstracts for the Eve Sedgwick seminar at the
University of Sydney on August 28 from 2-5pm. RSVPs are welcome to ensure
the venue is appropriate. Please email mgregg at usyd.edu.au to register
attendance.

Remembering Eve Sedgwick: The beginnings, present and future of queer theory
Speakers¹ details and abstracts

Melissa Hardie 
ŒExtinction of the Closet: Inside Lindsay Lohan¹

For Eve Sedgwick, the work of Epistemology of the Closet was ³inviting (as
well as imperative) but resolutely non-algorithmic.² This paper suggests
that the conditioning influence of the closet has fundamentally shifted, and
frames that shift as a form of extinction. I will suggest that closet
epistemologies, though still resonant, ramify less and their citation
exposes purposeful redundancy. I canvas the ways in which technological and
cultural shifts effected that change over the two decades that followed
publication of Sedgwick¹s book, focusing on the case of Lindsay Lohan. Is
what we now know about and through the closet that the closet is obsolete?

Melissa Hardie teaches in the English Department, University of Sydney, and
is completing a book called Shame Became Famous: Evolution of the Closet
1989-2009.


Anna Gibbs 
ŒAt the Time of Writing¹

My paper will focus on the possibilities for writing (and the distinction
between critical and creative writing) that open up in the face of
Sedgwick¹s exposure of exposure itself as a method - that is, of the
paranoid approach to thought which attempts to anticipate surprise and
forestall its own imagined future. The paper explores what happens to the
relationship between writing and politics if we break the nexus between
political engagement and the negative affects that drive paranoid critique,
and in the process assesses what Sedgwick makes possible by an affect theory
drawn from Tomkins rather than Deleuze.

Anna Gibbs is Associate Professor in the Writing and Society Research Group
at the University of Western Sydney. She has published numerous papers on
affect theory, most recently in Cultural Studies Review and Emotion Space
and Society.


Elizabeth Stephens
ŒThe Masturbating Girl: Public Confession and/as Sexual Practice¹

This paper aims to interrogate the critical reception of Sedgwick's A
Dialogue on Love as a confessional text, a revealing and intimate account of
Sedgwick's own sexuality and sexual practice.  Drawing on the argument that
subtends Epistemology of the Closet ­ that the idea of sexuality as a
private aspect of subjectivity is a product of the new public spaces
emergent in the nineteenth-century ­ this paper will read A Dialogue on Love
as a critical interrogation of the idea that the practices of confession and
sex are "private": ³I know I want to talk about sex,² Sedgwick acknowledges
near the beginning of this text, ³it¹s what I do for a living and I¹m good
at that.  But my own sexuality ­ do I even have one?²  Like Derrida¹s
earlier Circumfession, I argue, A Dialogue on Love invokes readerly
assumptions about privacy and disclosure primarily in order to examine and
to problematise them.
 
Elizabeth Stephens is a Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of
European Discourses, University of Queensland.  She is author of Queer
Writing: Homoeroticism in Jean Genet¹s Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2009) and Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1750 to
the Present (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, forthcoming).


Elizabeth McMahon
ŒThe Proximate Pleasure of Eve Sedgwick¹

In her introduction to Novel Gazing Sedgwick writes that ³pleasure, grief,
excitement, boredom, satisfaction are the substance of politics rather than
their antithesis². Further, she advises that we attend ³intimately to
literary texts² because their ³transformative energies² are ³the stuff of
ordinary being² (1). This paper speculates on the ways Sedgwick remapped the
relationship between affect, intimacy and politics as a queer critical
practice. The paper will consider the the dynamism of this relationship in
terms of the new spatialities of reading it enables, focusing on the
pleasures of juxtaposition and proximity that her writing enacts.

Elizabeth McMahon teaches in the School of English, Media and Performing
Arts at UNSW, where she previously co-convened the Women¹s and Gender
Studies Program. She edited, with Brigitta Olubas, Women Making Time:
Contemporary Feminist Critique and Cultural Analysis (Perth, UWA Press,
2006) and is co-editor of Australia¹s oldest literary journal Southerly. In
2009 she received an ARC Discovery grant for her project titled Our Island
Home: The Shifting Map of Australian Literature, an examination of
Australia¹s colonial geographical imaginary.


Dr. Melissa Gregg
Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies
Main Quadrangle Building A14
University of Sydney NSW 2006

p 02 9351 3657 | m 0408 599 359 | e mel.gregg at usyd.edu.au

http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/gcs/staff/profiles/mgregg.shtml

Enrol in our NEW Master of Cultural Studies:
http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/gcs/postgrad/coursework.shtml


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