Elizabeth Wilson This Thursday

We are excited to be co-hosting a special event this week! Each workshop is being asked to prepare comments and/or questions on topics especially valuable to their interests.  So please do let me know if you will be able to attend and I will forward you Elizabeth’s manuscript and introduction.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 23, 4:30-6:00PM
SWIFT HALL 310
join
ELIZABETH WILSON
(Professor and Chair of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuailty Studies, Emory University)
to discuss
“UNDERBELLY”
selections from her upcoming book
Gut Feminism 
in an interdisciplinary workshop co-hosted by
Medicine and Its Objects
Alternative Epistemologies
Comparative Behavioral Biology
Gender & Sexuality Studies
Self & Subjectivity
U.S. Locations
RSVP Kristina Pagel (klpagel@uchicago.edu) or Marshall Kramer (mmkramer@uchicago.edu) for a copy of the manuscript of “Underbelly” and the introduction to Gut Feminism.
Abstract:
Gut Feminism explores the alliances internal organs and minded states in the contemporary milieu where melancholias are organized as entanglements of affects, ideations, nerves, agitation, sociality, pills, and synaptic biochemistry. I am not proposing a theory of depression. Rather, I want to extract from these analyses of depressed viscera and mood some gain for feminist theory. I have two ambitions. First, I seek some feminist theoretical gain in relation to how biological data can be used to think about minded and bodily states. What conceptual innovations would be possible if feminist theory wasn’t so instinctively anti-biological? Second, I seek some feminist theoretical gain in relation to thinking about the hostility (bile) intrinsic to our politics. What if feminist politics are necessarily more destructive than we are able to bear?
The chapter “Underbelly” focuses on the first of these concerns. It uses Gayle Rubin’s influential work on gender and sexuality to illustrate how feminism has place biology at a distance from its conceptual and political affairs. The chapter begins by working through a small section of Rubin’s “Thinking Sex” to map out some of the conceptual and political effects of Rubin’s aversion to biological explanation. In particular, the chapter is interested in how the belly and antibiologism figure in Rubin’s efforts to forge new paths for feminist theory. The implications of this are canvassed via Melanie Klein’s theory of phantasy (and its relation to infancy and physiology). The centrality of the gut (particularly the stomach/belly) for the emergence of mind in Klein’s work is used to argue for the psychic nature of the organic interior, and for the importance of reading for biology in feminist theory.
Questions? Accessibility issues?
Contact Marshall Kramer (mmkramer@uchicago.edu), co-coordinator for the Medicine and Its Objects Workshop.

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