Annual Lectures
Iris Marion Young Distinguished Faculty Lecture
Each year, CSGS hosts the Iris Marion Young Distinguished Faculty Lecture featuring University of Chicago faculty doing innovative interdisciplinary work. On Wednesday, January 17, Linda Zerilli (Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College) delivered the 2018 lecture titled, "Feminist Critique and the Realistic Spirit":
Contemporary debates over the future of critique within contemporary critical theory perpetuate a reliance on the philosophical tradition, with its disdain for the contingent and indifference to local audiences. A realistic (as opposed to a philosophically realist or antirealist) feminist critique would be rooted in ordinary first-order practices such as politics. It would question received notions of the relationship between theory and practice. Theory should not be understood as epistemological second-order enterprise whose task is to justify the basis of critique. Instead, theory should be conceived, with the rhetorical tradition, as a world-creating, first-order practice that generates figures of the newly thinkable and objects of common concern.
As part of its tenth anniversary celebration in 2006, the Center renamed this annual lecture to honor Iris Marion Young. Young was a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and was affiliated with the Center and the Human Rights program. She was a widely known and well-respected contemporary political and feminist social theorist, concerned with normative analysis of public policy. Learn more about Iris Marion Young.
Past speakers include: Daisy Delogu (Romance Languages & Literatures), Martha Nussbaum (Law/Philosophy), Jennifer Cole (Comparative Human Development), Deborah Nelson (English), Susan Gal (Anthropology), Leora Auslander (History), Cathy J. Cohen (Political Science), Mary Anne Case (Law), Lauren Berlant (English), Christine Stansell (History), Martha McClintock (Psychology/Comparative Human Development), Jean Comaroff (Anthropology), Amy Hollywood (Divinity), George Chauncey (History), Wendy Doniger (Divinity), Jacqueline Bhabha (Human Rights), and Saba Mahmood (Anthropology.)
Distinguished Alumnae/i Lectures
Each Spring, the CSGS welcomes a UChicago alumnae/i working in the field of gender and sexuality back to present their work. On Monday, April 16, Joseph J. Fischel, PhD '11 (Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University) delivered the 2018 Distinguished Alumnae/i Lecture, “Kink & Football, Consent & Dignity” :
BDSM draws its moral, political, even erotic energies from consent talk. Yet erotic cannibalism and other lethal sex practices challenge consent as a guarantor of permissible, let alone good, sex. If consent does not vindicate any and all rough sex, what about other rough play, like football? Fischel argues that analogizing kinky sex to football to legitimate the former ultimately indicts the latter. Drawing on material from his forthcoming manuscript, "Screw Consent," and from his current research on the conceptual promiscuity of dignity, Fischel proposes that neither consent nor dignity deliver the sexual politics they promise.