BCRW\u2019s newest working group, Practicing Refusal: Thinking Beyond Resistance, kicks off with a public lecture by distinguished ethicist and feminist theorist, Denise Ferreira da Silva. Her talk engages what she sees as the fundamental challenge posed by black feminism: the questioning of a feminist critical grammar that re-produces any \u2018proper\u2019 apprehension of the female\/the feminine and exposing the limits of what constitutes a \u2018proper subject\u2019. Her presentation aims to dissolve what she calls the patriarchal form of the subject. Refusing gender as the only critical tool for describing females\u2019 socio-historical trajectories, Ferreira da Silva extends Hortense Spillers\u2019 reconfiguration of \u2018woman\u2019, the female and the feminine, in ways that dis\/order of the modern grammar of the patriarch.<\/p>\n
Denise Ferreira da Silva is associate professor at the Institute for Research on Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice, University of British Columbia. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race.<\/p>\n