The Department of Philosophy, with the support of the Faculty of Humanities at Brock University, will host the 9th meeting of The Luce Irigaray Circle in a three-day interdisciplinary conference devoted to scholarship and creative work on, or inspired by, the thought of Luce Irigaray at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts at the Brock downtown campus.

Luce Irigaray’s thinking has far-reaching influence across a number of disciplines and practices including Philosophy, the Natural Sciences, Women’s Health, Literature and Literary Criticism, Women’s and Gender Studies, Religious Studies, Indigenous Studies, Political Theory, Classics, Linguistics, Architecture, Performance Studies, Music, Sound Studies, Feminist Legal theory, Art and Aesthetic practices, etc. The Circle seeks to generate new possibilities for thinking sexual difference by honouring and supporting interdisciplinarity and the multiple research trajectories, methods and projects inspired by Irigaray’s thought.

This year’s conference draws its theme from the figure of the horizon mobilized in Irigaray’s work that encompasses social, political, ethical, and cultural processes in relation to sexual difference; a figure that indicates new possibilities for meaning – meanings that are located, historical and specific to the horizon of their appearance. In particular, we seek to reconsider Irigaray’s call to bring into view the appearance of sexual difference as a question for our time, as well as problematize the centrality of this claim. Does sexual difference open up other horizons of difference or occlude them? How can we conceive horizons of sexual difference?

The 9th meeting of the Luce Irigaray Circle will initiate conversations between this broader context of the figure of the horizon and sexual difference, and invites papers, panels, presentations, and performances that contribute to our understanding of the contemporary world by critically re-assessing and furthering the figure of the horizon and the concept of sexual difference. Please note all creative work and scholarship on or inspired by Irigaray’s thought will be considered. However, the circle especially welcomes submissions that address the following topics for inclusion in a number of thematically organized panels:

·       Decolonizing Sexual Difference

·       Performativity and Sexual Difference

·       Trans and Sexual Difference

·       the Global South and Sexual Difference

·       Sexual Difference across borders, including Sexual Difference and War,

Sexual Difference and  Migration

·       Deploying the horizon against itself

Call for Papers (deadline: March 1, 2018)