Sex, Theory, and Paranoid Structures
Campus Sex/Campus Security is a performative text. It is meant to capture a feeling—it is meant to describe the same of what Didier Anzieu theorized as a "formal signifier"—the psychic shape of institutional anxiety. The space of the campus, as a thing conjured in administration, is one to secure—a space to secure against all that might pose a threat. How does one work, as a feminist, in such a space without replicating the institution's paranoid fantasies about what it means to be a sexual subject?
Jennifer Doyle will talk out this problem through the things she's been reading: work by Didier Anzieu, Félix Guattari, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Naomi Schor.
Jennifer Doyle is a professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Campus Sex/Campus Security, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, and Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire. In 2015, she curated Nao Bustamante: Soldadera for the Vincent Price Art Museum. She is the curator for The Tip of Her Tongue, a feminist performance series presented by The Broad Museum; she is on the Board of Directors at Human Resources Los Angeles.