About the lecture:
Center for gender research is thrilled to host the lecture "'Female' Is an Experiential Category: Feminist Phenomenology and the Contingency of Sex" by Jennifer McWeeny, professor II at Center for Gender Research and Professor of Philosophy at Emerson College, Boston.
In the lecture McWeeny presents a theory of what it is to be female, based in the way a person experiences their body from the inside, within heteropatriarchy. According to this theory, being female is a practical and experiential category, not an empirical one. It is also contingent and changeable, rather than fixed or necessary.
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"What is a woman?"
The questions underlying the lecture is those of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir: What is a woman? What is a female? Are women necessarily females? Are females necessarily women? These questions are even more relevant today than they were when the book was published in 1949.
In the lecture McWeeny will also show how the phenomenological notion of female opens the door to other phenomenological theories of other sexed locations including male, non-binary, agender, queer, and trans.
The lecture is held in english and is open to all interested.
About Jennifer McWeeny
Jennifer McWeeny is professor at Emerson College and Professor II at the Centre for Gender Research at the University of Oslo. Professor McWeeny specializes in philosophies of gender and race, philosophy of mind, phenomenology and existentialism, and decolonial studies. She is a progenitor of the field of feminist philosophy of mind and has developed a theory of gender that sees genders as function of the type of self-body relation that structures consciousness.