Tuesday 20 November
5.15-6.30pm, Hovenden Room, All Soul's College

Jasmine Cooper (New College, Cambridge) – ‘An Exploration of Queer Childlessness in Contemporary French Women's Writing’

When we talk about LGBT+ parenting, we are always already talking within  a context of privilege – a first-world context. Despite some remarkable  gains for the queer community, primarily in Western democracies, basic  human rights and attaining a political legitimacy and visibility are not yet universal complacencies that we can boast as a global community.

Looking through an intersectional framework, I am interested in the emergent voices which articulate the anxieties of what not becoming a  mother / parent would mean. Given the ongoing normalisation and growing  potential of queer couples to access (although not always, and not in every country) fertility treatment, I am interested in how a latent fear of childlessness operates within queer stories and struggles of  “wanting” to become a mother. One argument might be that with more  rights and access to becoming a parent, queer couples are now able to  fulfil a “natural” desire for children; yet an emphasis on the natural  desire of becoming a parent sidesteps the issue of challenging a notion  of naturalised desire to reproduce in all subjects. If condemnation to childlessness was once the queer condition and fear of childlessness was/is a heterosexual anxiety, then we can see quite clearly how it is  that queer parenting is moving towards a heterosexual model of deriving  legitimacy from within the family and all of the constructs that the family portends (kinship, inheritance, nationhood, etc.). This move from condemnation to fear reveals an insidious aspect of agency, which is tied up in questions of legitimacy and social currency that still turn  on the axes of children and reproduction. I look at childlessness and  the question of (in)fertility, reproductive technologies and the queer experience of these phenomena in two novels by French writers:  Désorientale by Négar Djavadi (2016) and Gabrielle by Agnès Vannouvong (2015) to explore these questions.

Katie Pleming (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge) – ‘Reading the Body with Deleuze in the Films of Marguerite Duras’

What is the value of re-interrogating our immediate, direct, often  inarticulable experience of a the world, the text or the artwork? How  can we in turn “read” those initial responses, and what can those  responses tell us about our conception of our own faculties? This paper seeks to respond to questions regarding the link between  spectatorship, experimental cinema, and Deleuzean philosophy. At the  same time, it looks at questions raised by a historical reading of  Duras’s cinematic work: namely, what might Duras’s filmmaking moment have to do with the strategies of representation she puts to work? I’ll  be looking at these questions through the prism of the viewing mode Duras’s films invite, thinking about the challenges Duras’s bodies pose to readerly or spectatorial hermeneutic impulses. At the same time, I  will attempt to respond to one obvious question: why Deleuze for thinking the challenges represented by Duras’s bodies?