Vulnerability, Affects, Resistance

Please note this is a closed event to the Department of Gender Studies staff and students which has sold out. Any seats which become available will be offered to LSE Gender Students on a first come, first serve basis. 

This panel will engage recent debates and critical approaches to vulnerability, with interventions by Lilie Chouliaraki, Coretta Phillips, Jacqui Gibbs, Leticia Sabsay as chair, and a response by Judith Butler.
Engaging Vulnerability in Resistance, the recently edited collection by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, this discussion is set to reflect together on the affective work of vulnerability as mobilised in contemporary pubic discourses and policies, and as a key critical concept for thinking about contemporary forms of resistance and social change.

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. One of the most renown contemporary intellectuals of our times, she is the author of, among many others, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004); Undoing Gender (2004), and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009). Her most recent books include: Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (co-authored with Athena Athanasiou 2013), and Senses of the Subject and Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015).

Dr Leticia Sabsay is Assistant Professor of Gender and Contemporary Culture in the Department of Gender Studies at the LSE. She has published extensively in English and Spanish on processes of sexual democratization, performativity, and imaginaries of sexuality and citizenship in popular culture and political discourse. Her current research focuses on embodiment at the intersection of arts and politics. Among other publications, she is author of The Political Imaginary of Sexual Freedom (Palgrave, 2016), and has co-edited with Judith Butler and Zeynep Gambetti, Vulnerability in Resistance (Duke, 2016). In Spanish, she authored the monographs: The Norms of Desire: Sexual Imaginary and Communication (2009), and Sexual Borders: Urban Space, Bodies and Citizenship (2011).

Coretta Phillips is an Associate Professor (Reader) at the LSE in the Department of Social Policy and she is also a member of the Mannheim Centre for Criminology. Coretta's research interests lie in the field of race, ethnicity, crime and social policy. Her books include: Racism, Crime and Justice (2002, with Ben Bowling, Pearson); The Multicultural Prison (2012, OUP, joint winner of the Routledge Criminology Book Prize 2013); and New Direction in Race, Ethnicity and Crime (2014, edited with Colin Webster, Routledge). Currently, she is involved in a study with minority ethnic young people in London, including those involved in crime but not detected by the police, those deeply enmeshed in the criminal justice system, and those uninvolved in crime at all. The study’s research questions are concerned with why some ethnic groups are easily caught up in the criminal justice system while others are not.

Jacqueline Gibbs' work considers the politics of vulnerability in relation to gender, disability, illness, violence, citizenship, and the nation in the context of recent UK austerity policies. In her thesis, Jacqui argues that thinking vulnerability in relation to political subjectivities, cultural politics, and feminist critical investments reveals both the possibilities and limitations of vulnerability as a transformative concept for social justice. Prior to joining LSE Gender, Jacqui completed an MA in Gender, Media and Culture at Goldsmiths University, London, and a Bachelor of Arts (hons) in Political Science and Sociology at the Australian National University, Canberra. Jacqui has taught with the Department of Gender Studies on the core course Gender Theories in the Modern World.

Professor Lilie Chouliaraki is Chair in Media and Communications in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE, where she also serves as Doctoral Programme Director. Full bio to follow.