tgiFHI | Christina León, "Catachresis: Notes on Troping Difference"
tgiFHI is a weekly series that gives Duke faculty in the humanities, interpretive social sciences and arts the opportunity to present their current research to their departmental and interdepartmental colleagues, students, and other interlocutors in their fields.
We will host Christina Léon, Assistant Professor of Literature and Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies for the first presentation of our Spring 2026 program
How can language name geopolitical difference without claiming faithful representation, especially when such terms are under fire? This talk, from the manuscript Catachresis: Notes on Troping Difference, traces the critical genealogy of catachresis, a trope revived by deconstructionists like Derrida, de Man, and Spivak to probe the limits of language.
The argument centers on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who deployed catachresis to consider the ethical problems of representing racialized and colonial gender without fixing its meaning. Her engagement with Derridean textuality informs her critique of "master words" (e.g., 'women,' 'proletariat') and forges a more nuanced model of political representation.
While Spivak is a pivotal reference today, the deconstructive depth of her method is often overlooked. Recovering her approach offers a corrective to recent scholarship, like Lee Edelman's Bad Education, that aligns phenomenal difference with catachrestic negation. This talk argues against such a conflation of the tropological with the ontological, advocating for a deconstructive reading of difference beyond analogical similitude.
tgiFHI events take place from 9:30-11:00 am on Friday mornings in the Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall (C105, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse) with breakfast at 9 am. Our director introduces at the speaker at 9:30 am, and the speaker gives a talk of about 45-50 minutes. We then open the floor for discussion, and close at 11:00 am.
Free Food and Beverages, Humanities, Lecture/Talk, Research