The panel begins with Rahul Sen examining the gap between feminism and queer theory in their respective theorization of sexual pleasure and agency. His paper begins by suggesting that the contemporary popular feminist politics is based on a revival of the 80s-style radical feminism. This upholds sexual violation as the fundamental marker of womanhood, invoking Catherine McKinnon’s m>f model of feminism, where the woman is immutably powerless and the man is inherently powerful. Rahul examines the political ramifications that such a theorization of gender and power bears over narratives of sex. Taking its cue from Janet Halley’s book, Split Decisions (2006), Rahul then shows that the feminist imagination of consent cannot accommodate the queer subject. Following the works of Gayle Rubin, Lisa Duggan, Leo Bersani, and Alex Espinoza, this section argues that in queer subcultural practices, pleasure and danger often overlap, making it difficult to read sexual agency in a straightforward, pure, singular way. In the final part of the paper, Rahul turns to literature – especially the writings of Ovid and Anais Nin – to argue that “the literary” can offer a roadmap to address the breach between feminism and queer theory and guide us towards forging a critical solidarity among them.

The second speaker on this panel in turn problematizes queer theory’s position in relation to sex. Dr. Ashtor suggests that Queer Theory finds itself in a complicated relationship to the problematic of “consent,” for while contemporary political rhetoric emphasizes the supreme importance of agency (“My body, my rights”), the anti-normative foundations of queer studies conduce to a categorical rejection of the ‘legitimate/illegitimate’ binary upon which popular narratives of consent depend. Moreover, the exultant celebration of sexuality as ethically radical, psychologically violent and socially antinormative conduces to a field-wide inability to distinguish “violation” from the routine operation of “queer” sexuality. Queer Studies’ longstanding self-identification with “antinormativity,” broad suspicion of the homophobic ideology subtending the rhetoric of sexual innocence, and reflexive association of sexual emancipation as the decreased preoccupation with logics of constraint have made it uniformly impossible to consider the connection between sexuality and boundaries as dynamic and complex. Dr. Ashtor’s paper introduces the theoretical metapsychology of French philosopher/psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche in order to challenge Queer Theory’s dominant assumptions about sexuality. In particular, she explores Laplanche’s redefinition of Freudian “helplessness,” (Hilflosigkeit) in order to develop a new conceptualization of psycho-sexual vulnerability and consent.

Finally, the third speaker on the panel analyzes another important dimension of subjective agency: the subject’s relationship to body. Shiv Sharma’s paper challenges the pervasive assumption of agency in the contemporary accounts of trans embodiment by presenting a reading of trans and hijra stories from India. Contrasting the literary genre of transition memoir to the Indic literature that revels in mythopoesis, he shows that dominant narratives of transsexuality in the West rely on a hermeneutics of ownership tethered to teleological descriptions of medical transition. Thus, he asks whether there is a way of conceiving how we may inhabit a body, given or claimed, other than by asserting “complete occupation” over it? He argues that for trans subjects in India, professing selves, to borrow the historian Afsaneh Najmabadi’s conceptual paradigm, rather depends on un-possessing the body as individual property and encountering it as a body-in-conduct, traversing both desire and social norm, freedom and bonds of collectivity. By doing this, he raises the larger question of whether the conceptualization of trans embodiment should be confined to an autobiographical framework of ownership, which is based on a rather recent, modern understanding of personhood and biopolitical agency. Shiv’s essay suggests that a reading of trans literature unyoked from its narrative ‘resolution’ in possessive somatic identity presents a more promising horizon for trans politics and theory.

Each of the three panelists will speak for 18 minutes, leaving 20 minutes for questions and audience participation.