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 León, Assistant Professor of Literature and Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies as the first speaker for Spring 2026.

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.

Christina A. León is Assistant Professor of Literature at Duke University. She specializes in literary, anticolonial, critical race, feminist, and queer theories, with a concentration on Latinx and Caribbean literature, art, and thought. Her scholarly writing focuses on the interplay of materiality and semiosis to better theorize and attend to works by authors and artists who often become known only through their identificatory markers, overdetermined by grammars of race and gender. She is the author of Matters of Inscription: Reading Figures of Latinidad (NYU Press 2024). Her articles and essays have been published in Women and Performance, ASAP/Journal, Diacritics, GLQ, Sargasso, Small Axe, Representations, and Post-45. She serves as the co-editor of the Gender Theory book series at SUNY Press.

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