Topologies of Sexual Difference

The Communication, Politics and Culture Research Centre at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, with the support of the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, will host an interdisciplinary conference inspired by Luce Irigaray and her thinking of sexual difference. This will be the seventh meeting of the Luce Irigaray Circle. The overall theme for the conference will be “Topologies of Sexual Difference.”

In order to think and to experience sexual difference, Irigaray suggests that the Western tradition's conception of space and time could be reconsidered. There are at least three senses of topologies we seek to address: as the places in which bodies are and become, as ideal spaces of conceptualization, and as the designation of specific contexts. These contexts include, but are not limited to sexuality, “race”/ethnicity, gender, class, posthumanism and the animal, new materialisms, and sovereignty.

We welcome engagements with topologies after Irigaray in fields such as politics, philosophy, aesthetics, visual culture, linguistics, literature, media and cultural studies, psychoanalysis, religious studies, music, sound studies, architecture, education and legal studies.

The conference will feature the following keynote speakers:

Professor Elizabeth Grosz, Duke University, USA

Professor Pheng Cheah, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Further keynote speaker to be confirmed.

Information about conference registration will be posted by 30th April 2014.

Organizing committee:
Dr Rebecca Hill

Senior Lecturer in Literature and Philosophy
School of Media and Communication
RMIT University
Melbourne, Australia
 

Dr Louise Burchill
Visiting Lecturer in Contemporary French Philosophy, Aesthetics, & Feminist Thought
Centre for Ideas, Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts
University of Melbourne
Australia
 

Caroline Phillips
PhD Candidate
Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts
University of Melbourne
Australia
 

For further information please contact the conference organizers at [email protected]