SKY Advanced Research Seminar 2023
Spring 2023
7.2. Round table on: Judith Bulter: What World is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology with Sanna Karhu (University of Helsinki), Moya Lloyd (University of Exeter), Hanna Meißner (Technical University Berlin) (Joint Session in Feminist Theory with Freie Universität Berlin)
Abstract: Judith Butler is one of the most acclaimed and hotly debated authors of contemporary feminist thought. She has published prolific amounts during her career, and she continues to do so, introducing new thought continuously. Butler’s work has not only been an inspiration for extensive amount of academic work in many fields, but has also been studied extensively. More than a dozen of book-length volumes about her work have already appeared, and countless dissertations and articles all around the world have engaged in analysis of her work. Both detailed aspects of her work as well as her overall approach as a theorist, scholar and feminist are continuously under scrutiny. Judith Butler’s latest book, “What World is This. A Pandemic Phenomenology” was published in November 2022. In this roundtable three experts on Butler’s scholarship discuss this new volume in light of Butler’s previous work. What is new, what is the same, what is worth noting? What is important and what do we learn in this new volume? Each of the participants will draw on their own views to engage in discussion about the new volume, its ideas, and its place in Butler’s published thought.
The Roundtable discussants are:
Moya Lloyd, professor of Politics at the University of Essex. She has analysed Judith Butler’s thought in numerous publications which include Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics (2007) and Butler and Ethics (2015).
Sanna Karhu, postdoctoral researcher in Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her dissertation From Violence to Resistance: Judith Butler’s Critique of Norms (2017), University of Helsinki, focuses on Judith Butler’s work.
Hanna Meißner, professor of Gender Studies at Technical University, Berlin. She has engaged with Judith Butler’s work extensively in her research, including her dissertation Jenseits des autonomen Subjekts. Zur gesellschaftlichen Konstitution von Handlungsfähigkeit im Anschluss an Butler, Foucault und Marx (2010) and Ethik, Sozialität und Unverfügbarkeit. Ein lebendiger Ort für das ›Ich‹ (2018).
17.1. Jane Gallop (University of Wisconsin): Crip Theory and Late-Onset Disability (Joint Session in Feminist Theory with Freie Universität Berlin)
Abstract: This paper follows on Jane Gallop's 2019 book, Sexuality, Disability and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus, to focus more on the difference an attention to late-onset disability can make for crip theory. Crip Theory has been for the last two decades a site of important, groundbreaking theorizing of the body, combining as it does the insights of queer theory and disability perspectives. This paper takes what it calls "late-onset disability" (disability starting in middle age or later) as a point of interrogation for crip theory, introducing the question of change over time to the antinormative thinking of crip theory. This retheorization takes place via readings of two classic 90s text that were foundational for crip theory: Eve Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet and Lennard Davis's Enforcing Normalcy.