Deep Dive 2023 – Lucy Irigary
The Gender and Sexuality Studies Reading Group is delighted to announce Deep Dive 2023!
The Deep Dive is a series of 8 events, held over 6 weeks, designed to acquaint (or re-acquaint) academic staff and PGR students with the seminal works of a particularly notable feminist scholar. Deep Dives represent an unparalleled opportunity for time strapped academics to develop thoroughgoing and critical insights into feminist theory.
This year we will be exploring the work of Luce Irigaray, a French-Belgian feminist philosopher and author of multiple books including Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993) and The Way of Love (2002). Irigaray’s expansive oeuvre, which challenges the masculine character of western philosophical traditions and critically engages with the concept of sexual difference, offers a range of methods for transforming contemporary cultures. These methods include strategic essentialism, utopianism, and novel language.
Our exploration of Irigaray’s work will take place through lectures and a reading list, delivered and curated by Professor Mary Rawlinson. Professor Rawlinson is a Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies, University College London and Emerita Professor of Philosophy, Stony Brook University in New York. Rawlinson’s publications include The Betrayal of Substance: death, literature, and sexual difference in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Columbia University Press, 2021), Just Life: bioethics and the future of sexual difference (Columbia University Press, 2016), Engaging the World: Thinking After Irigaray (SUNY, 2016), Thinking with Irigaray (SUNY, 2011), and Derrida and Feminism (Routledge, 1997). Her next book Liminal Justice investigates the idea of justice in crime fiction. Rawlinson was the founding editor of IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (2006-2016) and Co-founder and Director of The Irigaray Circle (2007-2017).
The Luce Irigaray Deep Dive will be run online and in person. An introductory lecture will take place online, and a concluding lecture and specialist paper will be delivered in person. In addition, attendees will be able to register for either in-person reading groups or online reading groups. Please note, the online reading groups will only run if there is sufficient demand.
Contact Dr Rebecca Hewer if you have any questions: rebecca.hewer@ed.ac.uk.
Upcoming lectures requiring registration
- Thursday 6 July - Concluding Lecture - Registration via Eventbrite
- Friday 7 July - Opening Hegel’s Autological Circle: Irigaray and the Metaphysics of Sexual Difference - Registration via Eventbrite
Reading Group Schedule
- Thursday 15 June - Reading Group 3
- Thursday 22 June - Reading Group 4
- Thursday 29 June - Reading Group 5
Reading list created by Professor Mary Rawlinson.
For more details, find out here.