Correspondence One-Day Forum: Feminist Narratives and Liberation
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{ Keynote Speech } 講師：Fran Bigman 氏 (慶應大学客員研究員） " Challenging Binaries, Working with Paradoxes: Feminist Studies Today" Binaries collapse everything into a set of opposing terms: things are black or white, either or. Feminist thought has long targeted binaries as a damaging and reductive way of thinking. As Helene Cixous pointed out, binaries such as sun/moon and male/female are actually hierarchies, as the first term dominates the second. Even though Jacques Derrida went on to argue for the subversive power of the second term, since "male" could not exist without "female", the fact remains that the two create a closed-off system. The moon is everything the sun is not, and vice versa: there are no alternatives. Paradoxes, on the other hand, are open-ended and productive. In a paradox,something can be both/and instead of either/or. In this talk, I will explore the roles of binaries and paradoxes in feminist studies, using both literary and sociological work on reproduction as case studies, including work on infertility, egg freezing, and my own work on abortion in literature.
{ Graduate Workshop } "Caregiving and Circularity in Doris Lessing's The Diaries of Jane Somers (1984)"
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