In her talk, Prof. Baraitser will attempt to think about violence against women as a form of psychosocial carelessness. She proposes that the unstable gender binary is subtended by an equally unstable tension between care and violence in mental life whereby the psychic functions of splitting and denial that are mobilised to manage that tension collapse into the socially condoned practices of exclusion and degradation central to misogyny. 

This lecture is co-organised by the Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender & Sexuality (ARC-GS) and the Centre for Social Science and Global Health (SSGH), both at the University of Amsterdam.

About the speaker

Lisa Baraitser is Professor of Psychosocial Theory at Birkbeck, University of London. 

She is an interdisciplinary research scholar in Psychosocial Studies. Her research brings psychoanalytic and social theory together to address the temporal, ethical and affective dimensions of care. She has written widely on motherhood and the ethics of care, social reproduction, and the temporalities of maintenance, repetition and repair in relation to foreclosed futures. She has been part of the development of the field of Psychosocial Studies, and has written on methodological and epistemological issues in psychosocial theory and research. Her current research project is on waiting and healthcare in the UK National Health Service, funded by the Wellcome Trust.