Topologies of Sexual Difference
Luce Irigaray Circle Conference, Melbourne, Australia
Wednesday 10 December to Friday 12 December 2014
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.
In addition to the plenary sessions, the conference will organize parallel
sessions and an exhibition of visual art. Abstracts (200 words max.) are
sought for papers proposed for the parallel sessions (20 minute paper/10
minute discussion). Proposals for the exhibition must include visual
support material, submitted via jpegs (low res) and/or urls. Please provide
an accompanying abstract (200 words max) and short description of support
material. All submissions must be received by February 15th, 2014.
We welcome submissions from graduate students as well as faculty. Responses
from the organizing committee as to whether or not the paper or exhibition
proposal has been accepted will be given by March 30th, 2014. If you
require earlier confirmation of acceptance for funding purposes, please
contact the conference organizers.
Please submit abstracts and exhibition proposals to: irigaray14@gmail.com
In addition, the Irigaray Circle will sponsor the 6th annual Karen Burke
Memorial Prize, awarded to the best paper submitted by a graduate student
or recent PhD. The winner of the competition will give the Karen Burke
Memorial Prize Lecture at a plenary session of the 2014 conference.
Complete papers should be submitted to irigaray06@gmail.com by
15thFebruary 2014. Authors will be notified of the committee’s
decision by
March 30th 2014. (For more information see www.irigaray.org).
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
irigaray14@gmail.com
–