‘Rose coloured, in many different shadings … with uneven patches of blood’
Saturday 19 November 2022 in person and on Zoom
5.30pm -7.30pm
Goldsmiths University – Room no. PSH LG02
Zoom link sent to all participants
Abstract
Of the five constitutive components of human sexuality, gender is by far the most complex and intractable. Apart from the fact that gender is indissolubly linked to the human ‘lived experience’, it is the component which, more than any of the others, enters the field of vision, is socio-culturally established in a wide range of symbolic forms, and has become strongly politicized, up to the point where it has intermittently featured on the agenda of the House of Commons. My principal aim in this lecture is to question the epistemological status of gender as a source of knowledge about oneself and as a site where language and embodiment seem to be forever embroiled in a Hegelian struggle for recognition and sovereignty. This will allow me to formulate a measured response to the recent provocation by Paul B. Preciado that psychoanalysis is fundamentally conditioned by a normative binary paradigm and therefore inherently trans*phobic, yet it will also enable me to review the questions as to how gender is made, whether it is a necessary precondition for the maintenance of human identity, and what would be lost were we to do away with the notion altogether.
Biography
Dany Nobus is Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology at Brunel University London, Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council, and former Chair and Fellow of the Freud Museum London. He is the author of numerous books and papers on the history, theory and practice of psychoanalysis, most recently Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason: Studies in Lacanian Theory and Practice (Routledge 2022).
Tickets are £15 for the public, £12 for Site members and Goldsmith University staff, £10 for Site trainees and Goldsmith University Students and are available on Eventbrite.
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/on-language-and-embodiment-in-the-makings-of-gender-tickets-432530068077