In Eva Hayward’s work, cutting is generative. “To cut is not necessarily about castration but an attempt to recast the self through the cut body,” she tells us. Castration in psychoanalysis, of course, does not need to be literal. In fact, it must not in order for the cut to allow for proliferation of meaning. That is, a castration of enjoyment; an opening for elaboration, which makes analysis interminable. Trans, for Hayward, is a hitch, a hyphen, a suction cup, a virus, a threshold, poised to attach and alter. And “human-to-human sex has always been bestial (…).” In this event Hayward will be in conversation with Diego Semerene in an intimate dialogue covering the provocative, poetic layers that traverse Hayward’s oeuvre—trans substances, trans pedagogies, trans writing, trans desire, trans-animalities, the power of the cut and the limits of language—as well as reflections on Dutch sex. The dialogue will be followed by Q&A and drinks.

Eva Hayward is an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. She has also taught at the University of Arizona (USA) and the University of New Mexico (USA). A Fulbright Scholar (Austria), she has held postdoctoral fellowships at Duke University (USA) and Uppsala University (Sweden). Her research focuses on ecology, art, and trans studies.

Diego Semerene is an assistant professor in Queer and Transgender Media at the University of Amsterdam. Previous teaching appointments include Brown University (USA) and The American University of Paris (France). Research areas: trans theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and fashion studies. 

Suggested readings:

Eva Hayward, “Erotic Animal (inspired by Edi Dubien’s paintings),” Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon (2020), 1-7.

Eva Hayward, “More Lessons from a Starfish: Prefixial Flesh and Transspeciated Selves"

Women's Studies Quarterly, Fall - Winter, 2008, Vol. 36, No. 3/4, Trans- (Fall - Winter, 2008), pp. 64-85.

Eva Hayward, "Spider City Sex." Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 20: 3 (2010), 225-251.

The first reading (“Erotic Animal”) is the only one that is not widely available online for you to download. You may email d.semerene@uva.nl by May 20th to receive “Erotic Animal.” 

RMA and PhD Students in the Netherlands are able to receive 1 Credit for attending and participating in the event. In that case the suggested readings are required. Students who’d like to receive credit must sign up for the event by sending an email to d.semerene@uva.nl with the following info: name, student number, program/university, university email address, at which point you will receive a PDF for “Erotic Animal.” The hard deadline to sign up for the event for credit is May 20th. 

This is an in-person only event. No streaming and no recording. Only those seeking NICA credit need to sign up.