Just Say No to Becoming Woman - Claire Colebrook
06/05/2012
http://www.janvaneyck.nl/tagged/about
Abstract Claire Colebrook (Penn State University)
There are two ways, at least, to read Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming-woman. The first is to see it as a historical context in which the women's movement would begin to erode the figure of a centralized human reason, but would then give way to more complex and genuinely post-human modes of considering life beyond genders and genres. Sexual difference would be queer, not by deviating from genders but by deviating from all genres and stabilities. The second mode would be to read becoming-woman as an eternal concept of recurrence, as a way of avoiding what Deleuze and Guattari refer to elsewhere as the 'cancerous' body without organs. Here, becoming-woman would articulate a problem of relation, of a becoming always attracted by traits or quantities. Sexual difference would be queer not by being counter-normative nor by being destructive of closed forms, but by creating and releasing traits and pure predicates. In this paper I argue for the second mode, while nevertheless bearing in mind the risks and desires of becoming-woman as a historical notion.
Plaats en tijdstip
Jan van Eyck Academie
Academieplein 1
Maastricht
Nederland
11:00
