Gauss Seminars in Criticism: Elizabeth A. Wilson

The Humanities Council’s Spring 2025 Gauss Seminars in Criticism will be presented by Elizabeth A. Wilson, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Emory University. Her visit, under the general title,  Feminism and Negative Affects will investigate how anglophone feminisms deal with destructive states of mind and the negativity of anger. Her visit will comprise a public lecture on Wednesday, February 5 and a seminar on Thursday, February 6.

Wednesday, February 5 at 5:00 PM in Betts Auditorium

Public Lecture: “Feminism and Bad Feeling”

In a letter to Andy Warhol in August of 1967, Valerie Solanas reports that she has almost finished writing the SCUM Manifesto and plans to start hawking it on the streets in the next few days: “SCUM’s about to get into high gear.” She anticipates that once the manifesto hits the streets, “the world’ll be corroded with SCUM.” As time has passed, however, the world seems less corroded by SCUM than enlivened, inspired, and amused by it. In the years since 1967, the SCUM Manifesto has become a well-regarded and widely circulated text in anglophone feminist literatures. Now mostly an object of veneration, it is not gnawing away at the world with the intensity that Solanas originally wished for. Returning to Solanas’s corrosive ambitions for the manifesto, I will read for what might still be disruptive about Solanas’s text: How are the conventions of feminist scholarship and politics razed by this incendiary document? In particular, what theory of mind is Solanas working with and how does that complicate our ideas of the manifesto as a feminist text?

Thursday, February 6 at 12:00 PM – Location TBA

Seminar:

“Fury: What Feminists Do with Anger”

In 2021, the feminist journal Signs published a special issue on the topic of rage. In the editors’ introduction to this issue, Carla Kaplan notes the “extraordinary tradition of feminist scholarship on rage” (p. 787) and observes that the papers collected in the special issue are all doing similar work: they “harness rage as a resource, and use academic work to help foment the productive rage that forces change” (p. 785). I would like to put pressure on this idea–widespread in feminist scholarship–that anger or rage can be bound and delimited (“harnessed”) and then turned knowingly towards projects of progressive (“productive”) political change. In this seminar we will examine the sentimentalizing grammars of anger to be found in feminist literatures (Lorde, Ahmed, Straker, Malatino), and we will work toward a different understanding of anger, rage, and fury.