Celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Department of Gender Studies and the 20th anniversary of CEU
The Department of Gender Studies proudly presents the lecture series
Voicing Genders, Engendering Voices
“Derrida and Queer Theory”
A public lecture by
Eszter Timár
Assistant Professor, Department of Gender Studies
September 13, 2011, 3:30 pm, Auditorium
While Derrida's work is quite significant within Gender Studies and queer theory for important notions such as performativity, deconstruction is by no means embraced by scholars writing in queer theory. People on “both sides” tend to refer to a sense of incompatibility between these bodies of thought. After offering some general suggestions as to what explains this sense of non-belonging, this lecture will show some productive possibilities deconstruction holds for queer theory through an engagement with some of David Halperin's seminal works on the history of sexuality and prostitution in classical Athens.
Eszter TIMÁR received her Ph.D. in comparative literature at Emory University in 2009 and she is teaching courses on queer theory, performativity, and prostitution. Her main research interest is the intersection of queer theory and deconstruction; her main current research project focuses on a deconstructive analysis of fraternity and homosexuality.
The Voicing Genders, Engendering Voices lecture series is a joint celebration of the Department’s 15th anniversary and the 20th anniversary of CEU. The lecture series shares our diverse faculty’s most recent research with the wider academic community and showcases the multiple and interdisciplinary ways in which our field contributes to the themes of CEU’s university-wide celebrations: disciplinary self-reflexivity and academia’s social responsibility. Thus our lecture series is intended to contribute to the larger intellectual debates initiated in celebration of CEU’s 20th anniversary.