W(h)ither Identity?: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Unselving
Description
In Poetics of Dislocation, Meena Alexander recalls her childhood migration as an experience of “unselving.” The ocean that makes her an immigrant also dissolves inherited identities. Yet this loss, for Alexander, is generative: a crucible of poetic vision, where the self, fluid as tidewater, reshapes itself from poem to poem, contouring itself to each new shore that it meets.
Alexander’s poetics draws on a philosophical lineage that views the self not as given, but as continually made and unmade. Psychoanalysis sees identity as fluid, shaped through misrecognition; Foucault, as a product of power and knowledge; and Deleuze, as desiring production. Feminist and Queer Theory argues that bodies are gendered through social sedimentation, not innate markers. Black Studies emphasizes how certain bodies are materially and discursively produced as flesh, conscripted into (porno)tropes of fetish and fungibility. Asian American Studies, in turn, insists on the hybridity and heterogeneity of the immigrant subject, far exceeding the containment of “model minority” stereotypes.
However, across these traditions, theorists have variously figured the liquefaction of selfhood not just as an imposed violence, but also as a mode of refusal. From Tiqqun’s “desubjectification” to Leo Bersani’s “self-shattering,” Judith Butler’s “unbecoming” to Homi Bhabha’s “mimicry,” and Anne Anlin Cheng’s “immersion” and David Eng and Shinhee Han’s “racial dissociation” to Timothy Campbell and Grant Farred’s “dispossession,” unselving has appeared as a political possibility—a precipitous opening to transformative alterity.
But can selfhood be surrendered so easily? Who has the privilege to shatter the self, and on what terms? Might the performance of selective dispossession reinscribe colonial fantasies of racialized primitivity—a recuperative orientalism in which the Other becomes a fungible site for lost futurities? Does unselving risk collapsing into identity tourism, ventriloquy, or appropriation? As Natasha Tinsley asks, might queer theory’s embrace of fluidity betray a colorblindness to the violent history of racialized plasticity? And if selfhood is a necessary fiction, is unselving not a prescription of psychosis? To return to Stuart Hall’s enduring provocation—“Who needs identity?”—might it be that only the most privileged can afford to disavow it?
At a moment when racialized, gendered, ethnic, and sexual identities are under assault globally, these questions regarding identitarian capture resurface with new urgency. We invite proposals that grapple with the political possibilities and perils of retaining or relinquishing selfhood. How might we imagine alternative forms of subjectivity that neither reify identity nor abandon it to hierarchized dissolution? What poetic, theoretical, or political practices trace the line between dispossession and survival, between imposed fungibility and agentic plasticity?
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Cassandra Gemmell is a PhD student in the Social and Political Thought program at York University. Their research examines how subjectivity is produced, fragmented, and displaced across literary, archival, and historical contexts. They pursue interdisciplinary research in literature, psychoanalysis, and the history of science, examining hysteria and criminality alongside temporal and spatial metaphors that reveal atemporal, recursive, and non-linear forms of selfhood.
Speaker Bio
Jan Maramot is a PhD Candidate in English at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests are the history of American poetry and queer theory, specifically the history of queer poetics. He has a brief chapter on the conception of a queer confession published in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry.
Speaker Bio
Jenny Madsen Evang is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Utrecht University affiliated with the NWO-funded project Virtual Reality as Empathy Machine. Her research draws on Black feminisms, queer theory, and media studies, and focuses on the racialized and gendered dynamics of self-possession and dispossession. She holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Diacritics, TSQ, Women, Gender and Research, and South Atlantic Review.
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Speaker Bio
Karla Oeler teaches in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. Her research and teaching take a comparatist approach to film and literary history, theory, and criticism. She is the author of A Grammar of Murder: Violent Scenes and Film Form (2009). Her work has appeared in Cinema Journal, Critical Quarterly, The Journal of Visual Culture, Screen, and Slavic Review. Her current project is “The Surface of Things: Cinema and the Devices of Interiority.”
Speaker Bio
Nicole Trigg, PhD, is a writer, translator, and scholar of feminist, queer, and decolonial methodologies. Her primary area of inquiry is experimental cultural and intellectual production in postwar Italy, with special emphasis on the oeuvre of Carla Lonzi. Research themes include the politics of difference; creative practices and decolonization; and intersubjectivity and/as difficulty. Their writing appears, most recently, in The Witch Studies Reader from Duke University Press.
Speaker Bio
Suchismito Khatua is a PhD Candidate in the Program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. He studies contemporary poetry, performance, and cinema from South Asia and its global diasporas. He was previously affiliated with the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the Freie Universität Berlin. He writes in––and translates between––Bangla and English.
Papers
Speaker Bio
I am an assistant professor in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, US. I study how trans and queer communities in India improvise varied life making strategies in the face of routinized violence and the the rise of authoritarianism in India. I have published in journals such as GLQ, Radical History Review, South Asia Multidisciplinary Journal among others and am the 2023 recipient of the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies.
Speaker Bio
Tony Wei Ling (they/he) is a PhD candidate in English at UCLA, specializing in comics and fiction from the early twentieth century to the present day. His work can be found at SOLRAD, smoke & mold, and The Comics Journal. He is a managing editor at Nat. Brut magazine, where he also curates artist interviews for the comics section. He would love to hear about your zines.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Debashrita Dey is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad, India. Her research interests encompass Feminist Ageing Studies, Health Humanities, and Care Narratives. Her work has been published in journals, including the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, National Identities, South Asian Popular Culture and the International Journal of Human Rights in Healthcare, among others.