ACLA Seminar: Worlding Sexual Difference (March 22-25, 2016)
Worlding and sexual difference are generative forces that imply a process of appearance and concealment. For Martin Heidegger, worlding is the process by which something becomes unconcealed through its passing from earth to world. This aesthetic and phenomenological passing is constituted by strife. For Luce Irigaray, sexual difference is that which remains concealed through patriarchy. For psychoanalysis, sexual difference responds to the specular logic of sameness and is produced by the resolution of the castration complex. Elizabeth Grosz, on the other hand, understands sexual difference as irreducible to all humans insofar as human reproduction is only possible through the encounter of two gametes.