Penelope Deutscher wll deliver a lecture on ‘Revocability's 'Not Rights': A Lexicon for Reproductive Politics After Dobbs’. It will be chaired by Prathama Banerjee.
ZOOM ID: 83607316260 PASSCODE: csdsdelhi
The Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson is understood to be responsible for the revoking of reproductive rights in the U.S. in 2022. This lecture asks how to respond to such rights-loss, addressing their retroactive and anticipatory meanings and occlusions, and the complex governmental techniques of power with which they bind. A more capacious understanding of ”revocability," leads to a suggested lexicon for such milieux, including "buffered" rights; "not rights," and desecuritizing rights of "allowability." Focusing on France’s constitutionalization of the right to abortion in 2024 the lecture addresses international uses of Dobbs as a marker of progress or regress.
Penelope Deutscher is Joan and Sarepta Harrison Professor in Philosophy at Northwestern University, Associate Director of Northwestern's Critical Theory Cluster, and author of five books in the areas of French, biopolitical, and gender theory, including Foucault's Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason.
Prathama Banerjee is Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
Monday, 16 March 2026, 4 pm, Seminar Room and Zoom https://bit.ly/4cmYcNn
