Birbeck Institute/ London 05-06

Institute Home >> Activities >> Bodies of Thought Activities - Bodies of Thought Topics Lectures and workshops Forensic Futures: Interrogating the Posthuman Subject 16, 17 and 18 March 2006 This three-day conference will also include material from the final two workshops in the 'Bodies of Thought' series Click here to see the call for papers A provisional programme can be seen here http://www.bbk.ac.uk/law/conferen/forensicfutures2006.shtml 'Foucault and Feminist Bodies: Normalization and Freedom' - Monday 9th January 2006 A lecture by Professor Cressida Heyes, University of Alberta, Canada 'Bodies past': Friday 11th - Saturday 12th November 2005 The programme of this event can be seen here Andrew Motion: 'My hands in their life: inventing biography' - 2nd November 2005

Topics The theme for 2005-2006 will be 'Bodies of thought.' Some of the questions to be examined are: Property in the body and in the human genome: It is widely feared that we no longer possess a property in our own bodies. Instead, it has been argued, what we are witnessing is nothing less than a new 'Gold Rush', in which the territory is the human body. The body and the person: Are we our bodies, or are our bodies merely our tools? If we are embodied individuals, what limitations does that place on our rights over our bodies? This question surfaces in all sorts of public policy issues from trafficking and prostitution to genetics. Gendered bodies: To the extent that all human tissue is now the object of markets, it can be said that we are losing the distinction between men as subjects with rights over both their own bodies and those of women. Similarly, gender reassignment, transvestism and other phenomena suggest that the distinction between gender and sex is breaking down. What can we now say about the supposedly immutable categories of male and female bodies? Bodies, regulation and censorship: What are the limits of censorship over the body in literature, film and the visual arts more generally? Are there any restrictions on what people may see or do with their bodies? How do different countries view such rights, and what is the effect of globalisation on regulation by national jurisdictions? Future bodies, cyborgs and humans: What does science fiction as metaphor tell us about our desires to control and shape our bodies? The use of the cyborg metaphor in feminist theorists such as Donna Haraway and in such writers as David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) raises disturbing questions about the extent to which we can recognise human agency and emotions in non-human bodies. The body and the body politic: To what extent is the individual body subsumed in the body politic? For example, in France , individual bodies can be said in many important senses to belong to the national patrimoine and not in fact to the individual. What rights does the state possess over the bodies of its citizens and those of other states in peace and war? ^ Top of page Lectures and workshops Sander Gilman: The first lecture and workshop under the 'Bodies' theme was given by Professor Sander Gilman in February-March 2005. For more details see below. Foucault and Feminist Bodies: Normalization and Freedom A lecture by Professor Cressida Heyes, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality, University of Alberta, Canada Date: Monday 9 January 2006 at 6pm Venue: Room 203, Clore Management Centre, Torrington Square Admission is free Abstract: In his final work, Foucault suggests that care of the self might come to constitute a practice of freedom in the face of the normalization of bodies. What would it mean for feminist philosophy to separate practices of freedom from forms of normalization sold to us as care of the self? I show how some discourses that are vulnerable to obvious feminist critique (for example, weight loss dieting) are increasingly represented precisely as forms of working on the self that will increase our freedom, and suggest that Foucault provides few resources to challenge this dynamic. I argue that feminists need a new account of embodied resistance, and I briefly suggest that forms of working on the body that are not teleological, include an openness to new and unanticipated capacities, and that sever corporeal practices from cyclical suffering point towards a more robustly normative account of embodied freedom. ^ Top of page 'Does the body have a future?' A series of international workshops and conferences at Birkbeck, University of London, Bloomsbury Workshop 1: 'Bodies past': Friday 11th -Saturday 12th November 2005 The programme of this event can be seen here In concepts as diverse as the cyborg, the questioning of mind/body dualism, the contemporary image of the suicide bomber and the patenting of human genes, we can identify ways in which the future of the human body has become ambiguous. The aim of these three international workshops and conferences, under the aegis of the new Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, is to explore interdisciplinary answers to the question 'Does the body have a future?' The first of these workshops, 'Bodies past', asks what the past history of the body can tell us about that question. Two further workshops on 'Bodies Present' and 'Bodies Future' will be held in 2006. This workshop has now taken place. ^ Top of page