Convulsing Bodies: A conversation on religion & resistance in Foucault
with Mark D. Jordan, Carolyn Dinshaw & Anthony Petro
September 22 / Thursday / 5:30 to 7:30 pm
Social & Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
Carolyn Dinshaw, English and Social & Cultural Analysis, New York, University
Mark D. Jordan, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University
Anthony Petro, Religion, Boston University
In his most recent book, Convulsing Bodies: Religion & Resistance in Foucault, the path-breaking historian of Christianity and sexual ethics Mark D. Jordan puts forward an innovative and powerful argument for the relationship between religion and resistant bodies in Foucault’s thought. In the book, Jordan focuses less on those passages where Foucault explicitly discusses Christianity than on the way Foucault engages and even practices religious rhetoric, an engagement, Jordan argues, that seeks to reveal how speech works on bodies—and how bodies resist speech and power. Offered as a kind of record of Jordan’s own experience of reading and thinking with Foucault, Convulsing Bodies becomes a profound and moving meditation on the time of reading and writing—and the traces books leave on us. This forum puts Jordan in conversation with Anthony Petro, an historian of American religion at Boston University, and NYU’s own Carolyn Dinshaw, a medievalist and scholar of gender and sexuality studies.
This event is free & open to the public. For more information, please contact CSGS at csgs(at)nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.
Co-sponsors: NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, Center for Religion & Media, Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, and Program in Religious Studies.