Gender workshop

The toccatas, the fugues and the origins of Femininity - Julia Kristeva and her philosophy

Zuzanna Sanches (Universidade Nacional da Irlanda)

November 17, 2011, 17h00

Room 1, CES-Coimbra

Abstract

Julia Kristeva (born 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher and psychoanalysts. Her writing addresses issues of feminism, abjection, semiotics, motherhood and intertextuality. In Julia Kristeva’s writing existence must be conceived as a relationship of strangers. There the concept of otherness and Otherness mingle where the former stands for the excluded and the latter functions as hypothetical space or place which is of the pure signifier, rather than a physical entity. In this sense strangeness and otherness take on a new meaning not solely within the political sphere but also in psychoanalysis and gender studies. Understanding the intertextuality of our lives can lead us towards experiencing jouissance – total ecstasy or joy at discovering meaning of the meeting between selfhood and otherness: be it in mothering a child or mothering a text.

In this seminar we will be looking closely at Julia Kristeva’s “Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner”, the first chapter of her Strangers to Ourselves (1991). We will be talking about the theoretical peculiarities of femininity or the ‘women’s time’: their heterogeneity, multiplicity and momentariness according to Kristeva. We will try to answer the question of who is a woman, and whether there is such a place for her, usually designated as feminism.


Bio

Zuzanna Sanches holds a PhD in English Literature written on The Counter-Discourses of Femininity in Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction. Studied at the University of Warsaw, Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Universidade de Lisboa. Presently she is a researcher at ULICES/CEAUL – (Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa) in the Moderna Diferença research cluster. She is a collaborator with CETAPS (Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies)/Relational. She has a FCT post-doctoral fellowship with a project on contemporary Irish women writers working with Professora Doutora Luísa Flora and Professor Margaret Kelleher. She is a visiting research fellow at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

Research interests include: Irish literature and culture; British literature and culture; Literary theory; Gender and Identity studies; Feminisms; Hermeneutics; Translation.


ATICLE UNDER DISCUTION:
- Kristeva, Julia (1991) “Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner”, Strangers to Ourselves, Columbia [download]


Organization: Gisele Wolkoff, Júlia Garraio (NHUMEP) e Mihaela Mihai (DECIDe).

 

Nota: «Gender Workshop Series» is a space for discussion about one or two texts on gender which takes place once a month.