[csaa-forum] Assembling Masculinities | Friday, April 28th at the University of Sydney

[Timothy Laurie]

ASSEMBLING MASCULINITY | GENDER & CULTURAL STUDIES SEMINAR SERIES 2017



Speakers: Timothy Laurie and Anna Hickey-Moody | Chair: Nick Fogarty

Friday April 28th (2pm-4pm), The Refectory, Quadrangle, A14, The University of Sydney




DOES PHILOSOPHY NEED PHILOSOPHERS? MASCULINITY AND THE MAKING OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY



Timothy Laurie | University of Technology Sydney



Continental philosophy has long been criticised as a highly gendered discipline both in its framing of intellectual problems and in its institutionally embedded social dynamics. Although sociological tools have been used successfully to pinpoint many variables contributing to the gendering of disciplines, such approaches encounter hostility from blocs within continental philosophy itself, partly because philosophers have so frequently marked their distance from the perceived positivism of the social sciences. This paper argues that a more pragmatic understanding of the difference between philosophers and other kinds of scholars is needed to imagine alternative ways of using and disseminating continental philosophy and its sibling, critical theory. To do so, the paper draws on Moira Gatens' feminist approach to Spinoza to interrogate idealist accounts of philosophical labour, and links this to Ian Hunter's deflationary account of continental philosophy as an institutional formation committed to warding off social and cultural 'particulars'.




MASCULINE ECONOMIES: PERFORMATIVITY, AFFECTIVITY AND CARBON FUTURES



Anna Hickey-Moody | The University of Sydney



Contemporary economies of carbon production, consumption and trading mobilize masculinist tropes of competition, performance and frontier politics. Elizabeth Povinelli (2015) characterizes contemporary liberal governance as bound to carbon imaginaries: she argues that a system of distinction between sentient and non sentient life is sutured to late capitalist economies. A cursory glance at carbon futures trading markets brings Raewyn Connell's work on frontier masculinity into a contemporary context. I begin this paper by examining the masculinist cultural values of carbon production and consumption and then move to examine the cultural politics of such an argument, which has proven difficult. I examine the gendered politics of previous critiques of my work on carbon fiber, in terms of the feminization of interdisciplinary scholarship and of the masculinization of hard science. In examining the dangers of interdisciplinarity for feminists, in a scholarly context defined by what Eve Sedgwick (2003) has explained as paranoia, or paranoid scholarly readings, I question the fact that disciplinarity has become a core means for mobilizing recognition.  I contend that the dangers of interdisciplinary research leave feminist scholars open to multiple registers of 'paranoid reading' (Sedgwick 2003), as well as to the gendered critiques of interdisciplinary work that fails to acknowledge the boundaries of (masculine) disciplinary authority. The second half of the paper, then, is an auto-ethnographic account of the public vilification and slander I received in response to the 2015 essay Carbon Fiber Masculinity: Disability and Surfaces of Homosociality. Lead by an icon of masculinist thought and academic practice, Sir Richard Dawkins, this piece of cultural theory became internationally proclaimed as evidence of problems with feminism and interdisciplinarity. I will examine the gendering of both disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in the public critiques and personal slander.










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