Que[e]rying the Symbolic : Sexuality and Ethics of the Real

時間：2007年3月13日 Tue 17:00-19:00

地點：TBA

主辦：中央大學性／別研究室

簡介

'Unlike other identity movements,' American queer theorist Michael Warner once memorably observed, 'queerness has always been defined centrally by discourses of morality.' 'There have always been prescriptions about how to be a woman or a worker or an Anglo-Saxon,' he says, 'but not about whether to be one':

Queerness therefore bears a different relation to liberal logics of choice and will, as well as to moral languages of leadership and community, in ways that continually pose problems both in everyday life and in contexts of civil rights.

Warner's reflection on queer existence in the 1990s US context has a strong resonance in our local context here in Taiwan, as one bears witness to the rise of sexual moralism in recent years. Specifically, the moralism in question assumes the form of a feminist authority that seeks to police desires in the name of gender equity. Moreover, given the gentrification of gay politics in recent years – with the call for the legalisation of 'gay marriage' being the most prominent example - how to counter this new moral order then becomes a pressing political question for queers and sexual dissents in Taiwan today.

Positing the inseparable link between the social and the psychic, this reading group seeks to explore the ethics of queer life through the language of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Focusing on Lacan's 1959-1960 seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis and Lee Edelman's seminal No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), the group will begin by foregrounding the importance of the unconscious and then traverse through themes including sexual difference, sexual (non)relation, enjoyment, to finally arrive at the spirit of activism. It is hoped that this workshop would enable each participant to better understand cultural politics in libidinal terms. Texts marked as “*” are supplemented readings. A reader will be available upon request.

Schedule