11th Annual Feminist Theory Workshop

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March 24-25, 2017
Duke University

 

Keynote Speakers

Christina Crosby

Professor in English and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Wesleyan University

Amelia Jones

Professor in Art and Design and Vice-Dean of Critical Studies, USC Roski School of Art and Design

Katherine McKittrick

Professor in Gender Studies and the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies, Queen's University

Kathi Weeks

Professor in Gender Sexuality and Feminist Studies, Duke University

Christina Crosby

 

Christina Crosby recently published book, A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain (NYU Press, 2016), a first-person account of living on after surviving a profoundly transformative spinal cord injury at age fifty. At once deeply personal and deeply unsentimental, the book is her effort to “create something of an otherwise confounded life [by] ‘diving into the wreck’ of her body.” The book is deeply informed by scholarly knowledge, which nonetheless stays in the background as she returns in memory to the one she once was in order to sustain the person she has become. Grief and loss are a swift and treacherous current running through the book, a counter-force to the progress narrative expected of all first-person accounts of disability. She hopes that her book will help to open in disability studies a serious discussion about grief, a topic that sits awkwardly with the field’s explorations of crip pride, and the welcome re-signification of incapacities as variations of human possibility to be celebrated. Her first book, The Ends of History: Victorians and “the Woman Question” (Routledge, 1990), taught her to be wary of progress narratives and the “empty, homogenous time” of historicism (Walter Benjamin), for “women” were categorically exempted from history in order to secure it. “The happiest woman, like the happiest nation, has no history,” writes George Eliot. She is a Professor of English and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University, where she has worked since 1982.

Amelia Jones

Amelia Jones is the Robert A. Day Professor in Art and Design and Vice-Dean of Critical Studies at the Roski School of Art and Design at University of Southern California. A curator and theorist and historian of art and performance, her recent publications include Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History (2012), co-edited with Adrian Heathfield, a single authored book Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012), the edited volume Sexuality (2014), and, co-edited with Erin Silver, Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (2016). Her exhibition Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art took place in 2013 in Montreal, as did the event Trans-Montréal (Performance Studies International, 2015) and Live Artists Live (USC, 2016)both of which included performances and lectures.  Her edited special issue of Performance Research entitled “On Trans/Performance” was published in October 2016.

Katherine McKittrick

Katherine McKittrick is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Her research is interdisciplinary attends to the links between black studies, theories of anti-colonialism and liberation, and creative texts. She also researches the writings of Sylvia Wynter, with part of this work put forth in the edited collection, Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. She authored Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle and co-edited, with Clyde Woods, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. She is currently working on the monograph Dear Science and Other Stories.

Kathi Weeks

Kathi Weeks teaches in the Women’s Studies Program at Duke University.  Her primary interests are in the fields of political theory, feminist theory, Marxist thought, the critical study of work, and utopian studies.  She is currently working on constructing a counter-archive of the future of U.S. Marxist feminist thought.  She is the author of Constituting Feminist Subjects (Cornell UP, 1998) and The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (Duke UP, 2011), and a co-editor of The Jameson Reader (Blackwell, 2000).  

Christina Crosby selected reading: "A Body, Undone"
Download A Body, Undone (pdf - 4.12 MB)
Amelia Jones selected reading: "Otherwise"
Download Otherwise (pdf - 654.67 KB)
Katherine McKittrick selected readings: "Diachronic loops" and "Rebellion/Invention/Groove"
Download Diachronic loops (pdf - 424.17 KB)
Kathi Weeks selected readings: "The Problem with Work," pages 37-77 and pages 234-240.

Many thanks to our sponsors including the following Duke University Co-Sponsors:

  • African and African American Studies Department
  • Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
  • Cultural Anthropology Department
  • Program in Latino/a Studies
  • Program in Literature
  • Classical Studies Department
  • Political Science Department
  • English Department
  • The Office of the Provost
  • Franklin Humanities Institute

Institutional Co-sponsors:

  • Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies at Appalachian State University
  • Gender Studies at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary
  • Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University
  • Women’s Studies at Eastern Carolina University
  • Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University
  • Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard
  • Center for Gender, Sexuality & Writing at University of Kent, UK
  • Women and Gender Studies at North Carolina State University
  • Gender & Sexuality Studies at Princeton University
  • Women’s and Gender Studies at Southern Methodist University
  • The Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University
  • Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University, New York
  • Women’s and Gender Studies at University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  • Women’s Studies at University of Maryland, College Park
  • Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies at University of Pennsylvania
  • Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wake Forest University
  • Centre for the Study of Women and Gender at University of Warwick in Coventry, UK

Video Highlights from Workshop