Esquisses Speaker Series - "Sexual Indifference; An Interdisciplinary Conversation" with Prof. Jami Weinstein and Prof. Darren Rosenblum

Esquisses Speaker Series

Free event. A light lunch will be served. Please register on Eventbrite.

Recent popular and academic debates have again brought questions of sexual difference to the foreground. It is, thus, time to revisit how we might extricate ourselves from the seemingly intractable insistence on the primacy of sexual difference. In this talk, Prof. Weinstein (Linköping University) will take up the philosophical question of sexual difference through the lens of epigenetics, arguing that we should consider evolution beyond a reductively genetic framework. This shift has potential to diminish or even eradicate the importance of sex and sexual difference, since through epigenetics, bodies, identities, and environments are understood as co-constituted transgenerationally rather than uniquely issuing from, or determined by, bi-parental sexual reproduction. Following the talk, Prof. Rosenblum (Faculty of Law, McGill University) will dialogue with Prof. Weinstein to raise some political and legal implications of an epigenetic indifference to sex and sexual difference.

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Jami Weinstein is Associate Professor, Senior Lecturer, and the Director of The Critical Life Studies Research Team at Linköping University, Sweden with PhD in Philosophy (CUNY 2005) and History of Science and Technology (EHESS 2007). She is a critical social and political theorist, publishing in a range of fields like: Contemporary Continental Philosophy; Queer, Trans*, and Feminist theory; Afrofuturism; Science and Technology, HumAnimal, and Environmental theory; and Critical Life Studies.

Professor Darren Rosenblum’s scholarship focuses on corporate governance, in particular on diversity initiatives and remedies for sex inequality. They joined the Faculty of Law of McGill University as a Full Professor in August 2021, from the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. They were appointed associate dean (graduate studies) in 2022. In 2018, they served as a Wainwright Senior Fellow at McGill Law, during which they taught a course on Sexuality, Gender and the Law.They wrote the first article of queer legal theory “Queer Intersectionality” (1994) and the first article on transgender prisoners “Trapped in Sing Sing” (2000).