Nearly fifty years after Barthes’s Cours sur le Neutre at the Collège de France (1978), is the Neutral still a useful category of analysis? In the wake of #MeToo, inclusive pronouns, trigger warnings, and new imaginaries of egalitarian civility, the Neutral appears to have resurfaced as a critical concern. Our wager is that the Neutral names something real and always already at work: a suspension of fixed positions that opens space for responsive and inventive ways of being and relating. Bringing together scholars from across the humanities and the arts, this conference asks how the Neutral sustains vitality across music theory, French theory, film and performance studies, literature, psychoanalysis, and gender and sexuality theory. This conference is a collaborative initiative between the department of French and Italian, the French Interdisciplinary Group (FIG) at Northwestern as well as the Transitions movement in partnership with Université Paris-VIII – Vincennes – Saint-Denis and Northwestern University.
Participants: Thomas F. DeFrantz, Ryan Dohoney, Matthieu Dupas, Scott Durham, David Halperin, Hélène Merlin‑Kajman, Laurie Laufer, Augustin Leroy, Maïté Marciano, George‑Henri Melenotte, Nasrin Qader, Gérald Sfez, Domietta Torlasco, and Marie‑Claire Vallois
Audrey Wilfong
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