Jane Gallop Lecture

"The Phallus and its Temporalities: Sexuality, Disability, and Aging"

Gallop explores how late-onset disability is lived as a threat to one's sexuality and one's gender. She will address how sexuality survives and is transformed in the process, becoming, in these older, less able subjects, more perverse from a normative standpoint, more deviant from an ageist, ableist standpoint.

Jane Gallop is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin -- Milwaukee, where she has taught since 1990. Before that, she was Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Humanities at Rice University, where she founded the Women's Studies program. At the beginning of her career, she taught in the French Department at Miami University in Ohio (she earned a PhD in French Literature in 1976).  She is the author of nine books, and nearly a hundred articles.  She has written on a wide range of topics: psychoanalysis, especially the work of Jacques Lacan; French feminism; psychoanalysis and feminism; the Marquis de Sade; feminist literary criticism; pedagogy; sexual harassment; photography; queer theory; close reading.  While the topics vary, her writing can be understood as the consistent application of a close reading method to theoretical texts.  She has been teaching this close reading of theory to her students for the past 40 years.