Selfies: The Past and Future of Photographic Self-Portraits
2:30-4:00 p.m.
Peggy Phelan
Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts and Professor of English and Theatre and Performance Studies
Stanford University
This talk begins with a discussion of Cindy Sherman’s photography as a primary precedent for selfies generally, and feminist selfies in particular. It then moves on to a more philosophical and political analysis of what Phelan calls “the porosity of representation,” brought about by transformations in technology and psychology. The talk concludes with a discussion of the future of the self-portrait in the age of performance.
Phelan’s early work helped give a framework to the field of performance studies; her essay “The Ontology of Performance,” is among the most frequently cited in the field. She writes frequently about feminist art, performance theory, politics, and psychoanalysis and culture. Her books include: Unmarked: the politics of performance, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Grief, and Art and Feminism (ed. Helena Reckitt). Recently she edited Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970-1983.
“Could you direct me to the Individuology Department?” Psychoanalysis, the Academy and the Self
4:30-6:00 p.m.
Nancy Chodorow
Lecturer on Psychiatry
Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance
Training and Supervising Analyst
Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute
Professor Emerita of Sociology and Clinical Faculty Emerita of Psychology
University of California, Berkeley
This lecture will suggest that the contemporary university is missing a field whose main focus is the study of individuality and the self. The presenter conceptualizes this field, provisionally named individuology, as on a continuum with the qualitative social sciences, and she sees psychoanalysis as providing a major theoretical grounding. Psychoanalysis gives us a comprehensive theory of individuality, and its methodologies could be and have been extended to non-clinical work. Although individuology overlaps with psychology, and several fields in the humanities draw upon psychoanalysis, the study of individuals requires on the one hand a more qualitative, interactive and intersubjective methodology than we find in contemporary psychology and on the other the study of people, not texts.
Nancy J. Chodorow is in private practice in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Cambridge, MA. Her books include The Reproduction of Mothering (1978/1999); Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (1989); Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond (1994); The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture (1999); and Individualizing Gender and Sexuality: Theory and Practice (2012). In addition to writings on gender and sexuality, she has written extensively on comparative psychoanalytic theory and technique, psychoanalysis and the social sciences, and Hans Loewald and the Loewaldian psychoanalytic legacy. Recent writings name a psychoanalytic “American independent tradition,” provisionally conceptualized as intersubjective ego psychology.
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