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Eftihia Mihelakis - Keeping up Appearances: The Hymen as a Theatre of Metamorphosis

Eftihia Mihelakis
April 12, 2019
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Page Hall 10

Recent accounts of hymen reconstructive surgeries carried out in Western countries have sparked debates in medical ethics and sexuality studies. I wish to show in this talk that this type of surgery also has a major, expanding role in con­temporary cultural productions, and how it has claimed that place is an important part of how we read critical theory and its links to medicine and literature. In this talk, I will elucidate the processes through which the hymen's features have come to be considered culturally and biologically meaningful. By tracing the history of the "hymen" from its pathological construction (modern science) to its inclusion within an aesthetic discourse (Jacques Derrida), I will show how the expec­tations of hymen reconstructive surgery rest on the history of "purity," which extends from "blood rituals" in an cultural sense into notions of the "equivocal" sign and that of "becoming" a more normative category of sex and gender. I will try to ask the question: What do French contemporary novels (Virginie Despentes' Apocalypse bebe, for example) tell us about the impossibility of reconstructing one's body, one's identity, one's becoming. 
 
Eftihia Mihelakis joined Brandon University in January 2017 as an Assistant Professor of French. Her main objects of inquiry are virginity and adoles­cence, which she approaches by bringing together French Studies, medical humanities, and critical theory. In 2016, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University Calgary in the School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures, and Cultures. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative with a specialization in Liter­ary and lntermediality Studies from Universite de Montreal. Her book, La Virginite en question ou /es jeunes filles sans age (Les Presses de /'Universite de Montreal, 2017) received the Award for Scholarly Publication by the Canadian Congress for Humanities and Social Sciences. Mihelakis's scholarship has appeared in Girlhood Studies, Contemporary French & Francophone Studies, and is forthcoming in Captures: figures, theories et pratiques de l'imaginaire and Tangence. 
 

Sponsored by the Global Arts & Humanities Discovery Theme, Department ff French and Italian, Department of French at Ohio State University Newark, Center for Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.

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