This workshop takes a feminist post-humanist approach to the phenomenon of women’s sexual desire. In laboratory settings, sexologists have found a curious disconnect between evidence of physiological arousal and women’s subjective awareness of desire. Desire remains a mystery, located nowhere in particular in the body nor the result of any particular physiological or emotional source. Bessette argues that we should view desire as a muddy confluence of emotions, drives, and stimuli within and across bodies and psyche. These relational elements manifest in social and political context, where agential asymmetries exist among human bodies and affect how we learn to read our bodies’ arousal as desire. To explore this feminist post-humanist conception of desire, Bessette turns to Shere Hite’s infamous 1976 survey of female sexuality as a case study in women’s desire and the thorny entanglement of physiology, psyche, and politics.
Meet the Speaker: Jean Bessette, Associate Professor of English, University of Vermont; Visiting Scholar, Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, University of Chicago
Jean Bessette is a rhetorician specializing in feminist and queer studies. She is the author of Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives (2018) and has received national awards for her scholarship from the Conference of College Composition and Communication, the Rhetoric Society of America, and the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition.
This workshop will take the format of a presentation followed by a discussion. Lunch with vegetarian and vegan options will be provided to those who RSVP. Due to space restrictions, our workshops have a maximum attendance of 30. Registered guests will be seated first.
Persons with disabilities who need an accommodation in order to participate in this event should contact srwhite@uchicago.edu in advance.