Campus Lecture of Possible Interest...

On September 28 2006: Jess Cadwallader, PhD candidate, Macquarie University, Sydney 3:30-5pm Humanities Centre L-2 Suffering, Memorialising and Forgetting in/the Flesh Jess Cadwallader is in the final year of her doctoral studies at Macquarie University in Sydney. Her thesis uses a Levinasian ethics, as well as the works of Foucault, Derrida, Diprose and Merleau-Ponty, to examine the construction of the experience of suffering, and its place within discourses of bodily modification. Cadwallader writes, "In the context of the rapid development of a variety of technologies that alter bodies - surgery, growth hormones, pharmaceuticals, (the promise of) genetic alteration - it is unsurprising that concern about their use has been voiced from a variety of positions. Many of these positions draw on an implicit notion of the 'natural' and 'normal' body, notions which set in place normalising assumptions about bodies which are then embodied. Such assumptions can cause suffering. This paper explores a technique for marking the ethical consequences of various forms of modificatory interventions, with a particular focus on the place of suffering within such discourses and practices. The weaving together of threads of Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida in the work of Diprose on corporeal generosity offers an ethico- political framework that acknowledges the corporeality of subjectivity and the subject's responsibility to the other (in his or her alterity). I utilise her concepts of the memorialising and forgetting of gifts as politically and ethically significant, extending these ideas in order to explore the way that the corporeal gifts given by the other are memorialised, forgotten and attested to in different bodily forms. By exploring the ethics of various modificatory practices - including intersex surgery, growth hormone use and Modern Primitivism - through this framework, I mark the ethical and political significance of each, given current cultural logics."

Concepts Covered on September 21st

• Enlightenment tenets
• Liberal Feminism (tenets/alterations)
• Deconstruction of Enlightenment Subject (as feminist)
• Classical/Orthodox Marxism (Adorno and Horkheimer)
• Dialectical (Historical) Materialism (Marx)
• Commodity
• Exchange Value
• Use Value
• Automaton
• Alienation
• Ideology (Classical Marx/British Cultural Studies)
• Base/Superstructure
• Economic Determinism
• Consciousness Raising (Adorno/Horkheimer/2nd Wave F)
• Women as distinct Class (2nd Wave F)
• Culture Industry
• "True" Needs
• Popular Culture/Mass Production
• False Needs
• Standardization
• Formulaic Repetition
• Negation of Resistance/Veiled Exploitation
• Emancipation of Consumer Consciousness
• Pluralism and Demystification
• Uneven Development
• Hegemony
• The Ideological Subject
• Ideological Problematic
• Emphasis on Practice: (representation and meaning)
• Structure
• Tension as Interdependence
• Viewer as Commodity and Consumer
• Television: Apparent Naturalized Unity
• Self-Reflexivity or Self-Referentiality (intertextual and extratextual referencing)
• Reappropriation

Feministeppin'

For all of you WST 320 Bloggers: Be sure to wear or bring a pair of sturdy shoes for this evening's class. I'll be assigning you to your feministeppin' groups... and you may have time to practice!!

My dear 320 People,

Enough with the blue mountains and those purplish flowers. What was that? A tree-hugger's bad trip, I say.

Enough!

Blog on, my People. Blog on.

And check Tap's 320 House for any messages regarding class this term.

Later.