RAW: Cannibalism, Feminism, Philosphy & (post-)Psychoanalysis
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
No booking required
SYMPOSIUM MAY 12TH 12:00 - 18:00 FOLLOWED BY DRINKS RECEPTION
'For me, sexuality is in the body. And you should certainly not be a victim. It's not something that you go through, it's something that you are active in. I wanted to show you: a sexuality that is not apologetic, shameless, in the body, in the now.' (Ducournau, 2016)
This symposium will bring together academics, writers, clinicians and artists/film-makers to discuss notions of cannibalism in a psychosocial/sexual context. Issues discussed will be psychic, bodily, sexual and aesthetic boundaries and limits, porousness, mechanisms of incorporation and fantasies of devouring and being devoured. The symposium will include a day of live conversations, academic papers, open discussion, video essays and screening of artist commissioned films.
The sessions will take as their point of departure the 2017 film RAW by French writer-director Julia Ducournau. In her debut feature, Ducournau subverts the coming of age genre with an intense exploration of the theme of cannibalism to address questions around sexualities, desire, femininity, notions of the 'human' and intergenerational kinship transmissions.
Far from pathologising cannibalistic formations of fantasy and desire, RAW releases modes of desire, passionate attachments-as-embodied-dependency and intergenerational structures outside the realm of prohibition and repression. Psychic life always resists the social reality of prohibition that comes to constitute it. RAW love, tied to dependency and aggression expressed in cannibalistic impulses, throws the goodness of the lover and that of the loved one in doubt while it puts animality as the eruption of vital force at the heart of intimacy.
The film oscillates between comedy and horror and is charged with a visceral and intellectual energy that marks this out as a striking work with implications not only for filmmaking but for feminism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, post- humanism and philosophy. The panels will discuss critically and creatively Ducournau's work from the perspectives of psychoanalytic, queer feminist theories and theories of the non/post-human.
Confirmed Speakers
Prof Patricia McCormack (Anglia Ruskin University)
Prof Rosalind Galt (Kings)
Dr Noreen Giffney (Ulster University)
Dr Eve Watson (IICP College)
Dr Elzbieta Buslowska (Central St Martins)
Dr Carrie Hamilton (Roehampton University)
Dr Annette-Carina van der Zaag (Birkbeck)
Prof Lisa Baraitser (Birkbeck University)
Dr Sadie Wearing (LSE)
Dr Amber Jacobs (Birkbeck )
Dr Chrysanthi Nigianni (Goldsmiths )
Contact name: Matthew Barrington
Contact phone: 020 7631 6115
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