Denise Ferreira da Silva – Hacking the Subject: Black Feminism, Refusal, and the Limits of Critique
BCRW’s 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 ‘proper’ apprehension of the female/the feminine and exposing the limits of what constitutes a ‘proper subject’. Her presentation aims to dissolve what she calls the patriarchal form of the subject. Refusing gender as the only critical tool for describing females’ socio-historical trajectories, Ferreira da Silva extends Hortense Spillers’ reconfiguration of ‘woman’, the female and the feminine, in ways that dis/order of the modern grammar of the patriarch.
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.