Throughout 2026 our study group will approach gender against the grain—that is, not as a settled object of theory or a stable achievement of successive feminist “waves” but rather as a site of ongoing trouble, contestation, and performative reconfiguration. Gender will be read as that which is vexed and that which vexes: something enacted, appropriated, politicized, and repeatedly misrecognized. Rather than situating itself within a linear genealogy of feminist orthodoxies, we will adopt what might be called a no-wave feminist posture, returning as if for the first time to the philosophical texts that originally unsettled how gender could be thought at all.
In deliberate opposition to reactionary invocations of so-called “gender ideology” (read: gender idiocy), we will instead insist on preserving gender as an open, critical category—one inseparable from projects of radical freedom and anti-fascist resistance. Gender here is neither a doctrine nor an identity to be defended, but a conceptual opening that resists closure by biological essentialism, nationalist mythologies, and ethno-patriarchal authority.
Focusing on philosophical works in which distinctions among gender, sex, sexuality, and social roles are most forcefully articulated and destabilized, this study group will engage closely with key texts by Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. We will examine the deconstruction of both gender and sex before turning to the problematic of écriture féminine, where the sexed and gendered subject writes of and from within sexual/textual difference itself. Particular attention will be paid to how such writing attempts to open gender beyond regimes of mastery, sovereignty, and heteronormative intelligibility, thereby disarticulating it from autocratic, phallogocentric discourses.
We will ask not what gender is but rather how gender comes to matter, and under what conditions it can be thought, spoken, or lived at all. Is gender a name for a social inscription imposed upon bodies, or does it designate a more originary way of being, an instability at the heart of subjectivity itself? Can gender be said to exist prior to its norms and performances, or is it constituted only through reiteration, misfire, and resistance? By treating gender as a problem rather than a premise, our study will frame it as a site where ontology, language, power, and embodiment intersect. Gender thus appears not as an attribute one possesses, but as a question one inhabits: a fragile, contested process through which subjects emerge, are constrained, and—crucially—find possibilities for rearticulation and freedom.
Reading Schedule
All meetings will take place online using Zoom at 14:00/2:00pm (North American) Central Time on the second Saturday of each month between March and November. Each meeting will be between 90-120 minutes.
Butler | Gender Trouble
- March 14 – Preface and Chapter 1 “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire,” pp vii-34 (40 pages)
- April 11 – Chapter 2 “Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix,” pp 35-78 (44 pages)
- May 9 – Chapter 3 “Subversive Bodily Acts” and Conclusion, pp 79-149 (71 pages)
Cixous | Selected Writings & Interviews
- June 13 – “The Laugh of the Medusa” (trans. Cohen & Cohen), pp 875-893, “Savoir” (from Veils, trans. Bennington), pp 3-16 (31 pages)
- July 11 – from White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, Part II: Writing the feminine, pp 51-78; Part III: Writing and politics, pp 81-94; Part V: Writing roots, pp 127-141 (57 pages)
- August 8 – “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays” (from The Newly Born Woman, trans. Wing), pp 63-132 (68 pages)
Irigaray | This Sex Which Is Not One
- September 12 – Chapters 1-3, pp 9-67 (59 pages)
- October 10 – Chapters 4-6, pp 68-118 (51 pages)
- November 14 – Chapters 8-11, pp 170-218 (49 pages)
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