04/23/2026
Taking Sides with the Neutral International Conference
April 23-24, 2026
Northwestern University (Evanston)
Annie May Swift Auditorium
Participants:
Thomas F. DeFrantz
Ryan Dohoney
Matthieu Dupas
Scott Durham
David Halperin
Hélène Merlin-Kajman
Laurie Laufer
Augustin Leroy
Maïté Marciano
George-Henri Melenotte
Nasrin Qader
Gérald Sfez
Domietta Torlasco
Marie-Claire Vallois
Roland Barthes defined the Neutral as that which eludes the paradigm, that which “suspends meaning in favor of the sign.”
With the spread of French Theory across American campuses, the “thought of the Neutral” has continued to circulate and reinvent itself. In q***r theory, performance blurs the binary structure of gender. In Black theory, fugitivity escapes dominant categories through a fluidity of meaning.
Nearly fifty years after Barthes’s course at the Collège de France, in the wake of , when egalitarian gender civility is imagined, trigger warnings proliferate, and neutral or inclusive pronouns circulate widely, a desire for the Neutral has emerged. Through intellectual and aesthetic experiments, invited scholars across gender, sexuality, race, literature, psychoanalysis, language, cinema, music, and dance will help us attune to the Neutral and the novelty it brings.
The conference is a collaborative initiative between the Department of French and Italian and the French Interdisciplinary Group at Northwestern, as well as the Mouvement Transitions in partnership with Université Paris-VIII - Vincennes - Saint-Denis and Northwestern University. It is co-sponsored by the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, SLIPPAGE, and others.
We hope that many of you will join us.
