The Fifth Annual Lecture
The Fifth Annual Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Memorial Lecture in Gender and Sexuality Studies
with
Saba Mahmood
University of California, Berkeley
was held on
March 5, 2015
For a video of the lecture and discussion click here
Taking its cue from Eve Sedgwick, this talk offers a “reparative reading” of the ongoing struggle over the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed in Europe. Rather than read these debates as a standoff between religious taboos and secular freedoms, Mahmood unpacks the distinct epistemological and interpretive stakes at the heart of such conflicts.
Professor Mahmood’s work focuses on the interchange between religious and secular politics in postcolonial societies with special attention to issues of embodiment, cultural hermeneutics, law, and gender/sexuality. Her work is best known for its interrogation of liberal assumptions about the proper boundary between ethics and politics, freedom and unfreedom, the religious and the secular, and agency and submission. She is the author of The Politics of Piety (2nd edition, 2011) and, with Talal Assad, Wendy Brown, and Judith Butler, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (2009)
Sponsored by:
The Boston University Center for the Humanities, The Department of English, The School of Theology, The Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, The Department of Religion, The Department of Romance Studies, The Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature, and The Department of Sociology, The Program in Middle Eastern and North Africa Studies