The Gender and Modernity Group (GMG)
The Gender and Modernity Group is an inter-disciplinary research cluster based in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies. GMG promotes research in the humanities and social sciences on gender across the key social, political and historical coordinates of modernity. Established in 2009, GMG has already hosted a Symposium on the work of Eve Sedgwick, including a roundtable discussion for postgraduates from around Australia. Over the next six months it will host international visiting speakers, including Professor Sara Ahmed (Goldsmiths) and Professor Rosalind Gill (Open University). It will also hold an interdisciplinary conference on gender and modernity, bringing together philosophers, historians, and those working in gender, cultural and literary studies.
Upcoming event: Gender and Modernity Group
thinking fashion and dress sumposium
Tuesday 15 December, 2009
University of Sydney New Law School,
Seminar Room 442,
Eastern Avenue,
University of Sydney
Fiona Allon (Sydney)
Dressing Down the Nation: Sabrina and the Flannelette Series
Prudence Black and Catherine Driscoll (UTS: Insearch & Sydney)
Strapped to the Drain Pipe: Emma Peel and the Vinyl Jumpsuit
Stella North (Sydney)
Flesh Made Nest: Dwelling in Dress
Alison Gill and Abby Lopes (UWS)
On Wearing: A Critical Interpretive Framework on Design's Already Made
Keynote Address
4:15-5:00pm
Professor Jennifer Craik (UC)
Carlai, Michelle and Julia: A Liaison of Unlikely Bedfellows
Please RSVP for catering purposes to:
Download flyer here
Recent GMG events
Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness
Sara Ahmed
Professor in Race and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London
5 - 6.30pm Tuesday, September 8
Oriental Room S204, Main Quad, University of Sydney
For enquiries or RSVP Melissa Gregg
Email:
Phone: 0408 599 359
Download flyer for this event
Remembering Eve Sedgwick: The beginnings, present and future of queer theory
Friday 28, August 2009
A half-day symposium chaired by Melissa Gregg, featuring:
- Melissa Hardie
- Anna Gibbs
- Elizabeth Stephens
- Elizabeth McMahon
Abstracts
Melissa Hardie
‘Extinction of the Closet: Inside Lindsay Lohan’
For Eve Sedgwick, the work of Epistemology of the Closet was “inviting (as well as imperative) but resolutely non-algorithmic.” 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 Sedgwick’s 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
‘At the Time of Writing’
My paper will focus on the possibilities for writing (and the distinction between critical and creative writing) that open up in the face of Sedgwick’s 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
‘The Masturbating Girl: Public Confession and/as Sexual Practice’
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": “I know I want to talk about sex,” Sedgwick acknowledges near the beginning of this text, “it’s what I do for a living and I’m good at that. But my own sexuality – do I even have one?” Like Derrida’s 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 Genet’s 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
‘The Proximate Pleasure of Eve Sedgwick’
In her introduction to Novel Gazing Sedgwick writes that “pleasure, grief, excitement, boredom, satisfaction are the substance of politics rather than their antithesis”. Further, she advises that we attend “intimately to literary texts” because their “transformative energies” are “the stuff of ordinary being”. 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 Women’s 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 Australia’s 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 Australia’s colonial geographical imaginary.