Professor Robyn Wiegman: CIGS Annual Lecture - The Times We’re In

Date: 05 December 2012, 5.00pm
Location: Western Lecture Theatre - Leeds University Business School

Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies Annual Lecture

This is an event organised by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies in conjunction with two Leeds Humanities Research Institute (LHRI) related projects - the Between Disciplines; lecture series and the Home, Community and Belonging research theme.

Robyn Wiegman: Professor of English and Women's Studies, Duke University, US

Abstract

In 1997, when Eve Sedgwick provocatively challenged the critical hegemony of paranoid reading, the alternative she offered – reparation – was widely associated with the personal, sentimental, and anti-intellectual. Today, the situation is vastly different, as feminist and queer studies scholars have reoriented their critical labor not just toward the study of affect but toward the cultivation of what we might call, following Teresa Brenna, new “affective atmospheres” for theory. Think Cruel Optimism, Feeling Backward, Lose Your Mother, and Time Binds. Each of these works inhabits a temporal idiom – as ordinary, melancholic, haunting, or eroticizing – to contemplate the conditions of the political present. By parsing the language, sensations, and political investments of “The Times We’re In,” this talk sketches the reparative inclinations of feminist and queer theory today.