Feminist science scholar and theorist Elizabeth A. Wilson will deliver the Humanities Council’s first Spring 2025 Gauss Seminar in Criticism on February 5-6. Her two-day visit to Princeton University, under the general title “Feminism and Negative Affects,” will investigate how anglophone feminisms deal with destructive states of mind and the negativity of anger. The visit will include a public lecture and a lunch seminar.
Wilson’s lecture, “Feminism and Bad Feeling,” will be held on Wednesday, February 5 at 5 pm in Betts Auditorium. Returning to Valerie Solanas’s corrosive ambitions for the SCUM Manifesto (1967), this talk will examine the text’s potential for disruption today: How are the conventions of feminist scholarship and politics razed by this incendiary document? This event is open to the public.
During a lunch seminar on Thursday, February 6, titled “Fury: What Feminists Do with Anger,” Wilson will explore the sentimentalizing grammars of anger found in feminist literatures. RSVP is required for this discussion, which is open only to members of the University community.
Wilson is a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Her research investigates how psychoanalysis, neurobiology, and affect theory can be used to foster conceptual innovation in feminist and queer theory.
She is currently undertaking archival research on Valerie Solanas and the politics of anger and pathology in feminist theory. She is also editing a volume of Solanas’s letters for Duke University Press.
Instituted in 1949 in honor of Dean Christian Gauss, the Gauss Seminars in Criticism provide a forum for discussion, study, and the exchange of ideas in the humanities.
In April, cultural critic Rey Chow (Duke University) will deliver the final Gauss Seminar of the 2024-25 year. Visit the Humanities Council website for more information.
