Photograph by Collier Schorr. Courtesy The Cut for New York Magazine.
The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice will host a study group on the work of Judith Butler at at Pollyanna 圖書館 Library, 221A. This six-session study group is convened in anticipation of her academic visit and public lecture at UBC in the Winter of 2019.
Judith Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as the Hannah Arendt Chair at The European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland. From 2018–20, Butler will serve as the Vice President of the Modern Languages Association, New York, and from 2020–21 she will serve as the MLA’s President.
Butler rose to prominence in 1990 with Gender Trouble, a book that unearthed and interrogated foundational assumptions of gender in philosophy and feminist theory. Butler’s scholarship challenges the confines of disciplinary thinking, reading across philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature. Butler is also known for her commitment to political activism and her vocal opposition to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.
This study group will engage with Butler’s writings from the last two decades, which advanced from her critical early works on gender and sex to engagements with theories of self, the nation, political agency, and transformative politics. As an exercise in collective learning, this program engages with the Belkin Gallery’s Beginning with the Seventies, a series of four exhibitions that are based upon a multi-year research project investigating the 1970s, an era when social movements of all kinds—feminism, environmentalism, LGBTQ and Indigenous rights, access to health services and housing—began to coalesce into models of self-organization that overlapped with the production of art and culture.
No registration is necessary to participate. All sessions of the study group are open to all and free to attend. Each session will be facilitated by study leaders who have selected texts from Butler’s work as primary readings paired alongside supplementary materials.
For access to study materials please email librarian@polly-anna.ca.
Judith Butler, “Unwritten Laws, Aberrant Transmissions,” Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death
Judith Butler, “An Account of Oneself” and “Foucault’s Critical Account of Himself,” Giving an Account of Oneself
Michel Foucault, “How Much Does it Cost for Reason to Tell the Truth?” Foucault Live (1989)
Judith Butler, “Responsiveness as Responsibility,” “The Political Promise of the Performative,” “The Political Affects of Plural Performativity” and “The University, the Humanities, and the Book Bloc,” Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (2013)
Gayle Rubin with Judith Butler, “Sexual Traffic,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (1994)
Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler, excerpt, Who Sings the Nation-state? Language, Politics, Belonging (2007)
Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015)
Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler, excerpt, Who Sings the Nation-state? Language, Politics, Belonging (2007)
Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015)
Markus Kip, “Solidarity,” Keywords for Radicals (2016)
Asad Haider, “Universality,” Mistaken Identity (2018)
Collective Acts taps into the generative potential of archival research by artists into experiments with collective organizing and cooperative production, presenting new work by Dana Claxton, Jeneen Frei Njootli and the ReMatriate Collective, Christine D’Onofrio and Heather Kai Smith, alongside work by Salish Weavers Guild members Mary Peters, Adeline Lorenzetto and Annabel Stewart. Beginning with the Seventies: Collective Acts is curated by Lorna Brown and is the third of four exhibitions based upon the Belkin Art Gallery’s research project investigating the 1970s, an era when social movements of all kinds – feminism, environmentalism, LGBTQ rights, Indigenous rights, access to health services and housing – began to coalesce into models of self-organization that overlapped with the production of art and culture. Noting the resurgence of art practice involved with social activism and an increasing interest in the 1970s from younger producers, the Belkin has connected with diverse archives and activist networks to bring forward these histories, to commission new works of art and writing and to provide a space for discussion and debate.
[more]In conjunction with our fall exhibition Beginning with the Seventies: Collective Acts, join us for a talk by Christine D’Onofrio (UBC Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory) and Heather Kai Smith (Emily Carr University of Art + Design).
[more]Please join Professor Erin Silver (UBC Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory) for a tour and discussion of some of the works in the current exhibition at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Beginning with the Seventies: Collective Acts.
[more]As part of the exhibition Beginning with the Seventies: Collective Acts, the Belkin is honoured to present an afternoon symposium addressing key issues in feminism related to collective organizing, mobilization and individual resistance. How does attention to the archive affect everyday experience and acts of resistance to hegemonic inequality? Attending to struggles with racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other intersecting oppressions, this program will address the exhibition and the stubborn frustrations that persist in perpetuity. Please join us in conversation with Candice Hopkins and Marilyn Dumont.
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