Keynote speakers
Tina Chanter (DePaul University, US)
Davina Cooper, (Kent Law School, UK)
Elsa Dorlin (Université Paris 8, France)
Jack (Judith) Halberstam (University of Southern California, US)
Organized by
Gender Studies /
Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies /
University of Helsinki
www.helsinki.fi/genderstudies/conference
Contact information
Tel. +358 9 191 233 93
www.helsinki.fi/genderstudies/conference
[email protected]
@UHGender
#christina13
Thursday 23 May
Session 1
Panel 1: Concepts in Feminist Theory I
Naomi Scheman, University of Minnesota/Umeå University, USA
(Extraordinary) Ordinary Language: How to Stop Making (Common) Sense
Concepts are embedded in “forms of life”, to use Wittgenstein’s term; hence, “ordinary” concepts carry problematically common sense norms of gender, race, sexuality, ability, class. Feminist and other liberatory theorists
have challenged ordinary concepts with alternatives crafted precisely to disrupt common sense. As frequently
useful as such concepts are, they carry problems associated with the—institutionalized, academic—forms of
life in which they are typically embedded. I will suggest a revisionist use of (much-maligned and subsequently
neglected) Anglo-American ordinary language philosophy as an alternative way of disrupting common sense
and discovering/crafting concepts embedded in and capable of fostering non-oppressive forms of life.
Ordinary language philosophy was maligned for its apparent conservatism: in drawing philosophical conclusions from what “we” are inclined to say, it seems to deny philosophy the ability to disorient us, to challenge
common sense. But if critique of what “we” are inclined to say (including questioning who “we” are) needs
to come from outside the realm of the ordinary, the question arises: where that might be, and who can find
themselves there? I suggest that rather than escaping the ordinary, we complicate it.
I draw on what I call the “extraordinary ordinary”: ordinary in being “lived in” (what Cherrie Moraga calls
“theory in the flesh”), embodied, used in negotiating the passages of everyday life; extraordinary (from the
perspective of the privileged) in being on the margins, outside of common sense, transgressive. Theorizing
grounded in diversely extraordinary ordinary forms of life (e.g., Latina feminist, variously transgendered)
provides generatively disorienting perspectives on the ordinary language of common sense and richly textured alternatives to it. Think of concepts such as mestizaje, which messes with dominant European and North
American understandings of race, and the wild proliferation of queer identities that mess with dominant, even
feminist, understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality.
Eva De Clercq, Università di Pisa - Catholic University of Leuven, Italy
The Speaking Female Body
The ostentatious adherence to all kinds of female coverings; the widespread obsession to re-sculpture the
body through dieting and cosmetic surgery, the pathological use of internet sites like Second Life which hold
the promise of a bodiless cyber life. In my research, I am drawn time and again to this phenomenon of the
speaking female body. Many (feminist) scholars would contest my starting point on the grounds that the notion of the female body entails the risk of endorsing an essentialist viewpoint that defines woman as a being
at the mercy of biology. However, throughout my research, “female” does not refer to a biological sex upon
which a gender construct is artificially imposed. It instead denotes a unique corporeal given. My appeal to the
body as a given, should not be understood as a reference to a natural, fixed entity, but more along the lines of
what Lyotard has called the inhuman, infancy or thing; something that belongs to the heart of humanity itself;
something from which we cannot emancipate ourselves because it is constitutive of who we are. Still, there
where Lyotard identifies the inhuman with the incapacity of articulating what affects us, I connect it with the
inescapability of our corporeal uniqueness which wounds us. For my viewpoint on vulnerability I am deeply
indebted to Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler, but where they understand it in terms of relationality, I see it
as something very intimate. I admit that my use of the notion female body remains quite provocative because
by referring (implicitly or explicitly) to its male counterpart, it has almost inevitably a biological connation.
Still, I believe that it is necessary to use the term with “bad intentions” in order to liberate it from the straight
jacket of sex and gender.
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Maud Perrier, University of Bristol, UK
Where is the Psyche in the Affective Turn?
This paper interrogates the relative absence of the psyche in the recent affective turn and discusses what concept of the unconscious is compatible for a feminist theory also concerned with deconstructing the political
and ethical role of emotions. The affective turn is characterized by a tension between those scholars who work
with Deleuzian ethics and those who privilege a more Foucaldian inspired perspective (Berlant 2004, Cvetkovich 2003, Brennan 2004, Probyn 2005, Ahmed, 2011). For example Hemmings (2005) has argued that the
recent turn to affect, because it sees itself as an answer to the limitations of poststructuralist work, places too
much emphasis on the ontological and the intersubjective and obscures the ways in which affects are themselves also produced in and through power relations. I argue that one of the results of this opposition is that
the unconscious dimension of affect has been significantly neglected by most affect scholars. I suggest that
combining an appreciation of how our early attachments shape our affective worlds with a concern for how
structures get under our skin provides a more critical and embodied account of affect. There has already been
a long and reciprocal feminist engagement between psychoanalysis and politics, from Juliet Mitchell to Judith
Butler (1997), but we need to re-connect earlier feminist appropriations of psychoanalytical concepts with the
more recent developments in feminist affect theory. Kristyn Gorton has argued that the strength of the affective turn is its critique of what affect ‘does’ politically, enabling us to think about affect beyond its association
with the psyche (2007: 346). I show, drawing on my own work on conflict and kindness (Perrier, forthcoming)
that the psyche can still remain central to an inquiry of the place that emotions play in the reproduction of
inequalities and their ethical role in politics.
Mervi Patosalmi, University of Helsinki, Finland
Relational Autonomy and Sexuality
In recent decades an increasing number of feminist theorists have provided analyses and rethinking of the notions of freedom and autonomy. They have, however, often neglected sexuality in their theorising. My paper
explores connections between autonomy and sexuality by studying Marilyn Friedman’s concept of relational
autonomy. Her thought is inspired by a liberal notion of autonomy while aiming to take into account social and
relational aspects. According to Friedman, behaviour is autonomous if it accords with the wants, cares, values,
or commitments that the acting person has reflectively reaffirmed and can sustain even in the face of some
opposition from others. At the same time, Friedman maintains that autonomy is socially grounded. In my paper I analyse, in addition to Friedman’s account of autonomy, how sexuality could be theorised in connection
with Friedman’s thought. My presentation has three parts; I first introduce Friedman’s concept of autonomy
and why and how she defends the notion essential for feminism. In the second section I study sexuality and
autonomy together. Friedman has analysed the relationship between romantic love and personal autonomy and
I study whether this part of her thinking could offer basis for sexual agency. The last section of my paper is a
critical endeavour to think beyond Friedman’s way of theorising autonomy, especially in regard to sexuality.
Overall, my paper demonstrates what kinds of effects the concept of autonomy has on our way of thinking
about sexuality and sexual agency.
Panel 2: Intersectionality I
Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, USA
Varieties of Feminism: Intersectionality and Gender Politics
The term intersectionality invokes “race, class and gender” as dimensions of inequality that operate in and
through each other, but different understandings of inequality shape how they are addressed politically. This
has been long understood in the case of class inequality, where the US is very different than Europe in what
ways of talking about social justice are most familiar. But race, nationality or ethnicity and gender are also
framed differently in different political systems and also reflect social struggles of long historical duration.
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In this presentation, based on my recent book of the same title, I draw attention to the ways that struggles for
gender equality have intersected with those for class and race justice and continue intersectionally to shape the
meaning of all forms of inequality.
To illustrate this, I contrast the race-centered framing of gender equality as the outcome of dismantling stereotypes and ending discrimination that dominates in the US with the class-centered framing of gender equality
as the outcome of effective government actions to promote women’s full participation in governance and equal
inclusion in the distribution of social goods that characterizes Germany. I suggest that the EU mixes these
models in a uniquely hybrid model which offers both potential and risks for actually reducing inequalities in
its member states. I point to the problems of growing class inequality in the US and growing racialization of
religious minorities in Europe as intersecting dangerously with gender inequalities in both parts of the world.
Natalie Thomlinson, University of Cambridge, UK
The Intersection of Privilege and Oppression: Some Evidence from Oral Histories with Feminist Activists.
This paper arises from my PhD research on ethnicity and race in the English women’s movement post 1968.
Oral history interviews with both white and /or ethnic minority feminists from this period revealed the complexity of these debates and the emotions they generated. Particularly interesting were my interviews with
women who were both white and from ethnic minorities. Although scholars often utilise the concept of intersectionality whilst examining the effects of multiple oppressions on each other, they less often examine the
intersection of privilege and oppression. For this paper, I will examine the oral testimony of one Irish, and
two Jewish, feminists arguing that these interviews offer excellent insight as to how the intersection of white
privilege and ethnic discrimination operated to produce complex and contradictory subject positions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, women from these backgrounds felt themselves to have a different relationship to white
privilege than white women of English ancestry. Although their experience of ethnically-based discrimination
often motivated them to become involved in anti-racist campaigns, there was a constant tension for them in
maintaining their claims to their own specific oppressions with the undoubted privilege that being white nevertheless bought. These tensions came out in their oral testimonies, which demonstrate the many contradictory
emotions that these debates effected in these women. Indeed, the position of both ‘oppressed’ and ‘oppressor’
that these women occupied resulted in contradictions so violent that the interviewees were sometimes unable
to give a coherent narrative of their feelings about, and place in, feminist debates about ethnicity and race during this era. I will conclude by suggesting that using oral testimony allows us a greater insight into the lived
experience of intersectionality, providing us with more a nuanced way of understanding how intersecting
identities motivate individual attitudes and actions.
Helen Gremillion, Unitec Institute of Technology, New Zealand
The Analytic and Institutional Space of Transdisciplinary Gender Studies
This presentation explores concepts of gender and transdisciplinarity in order to defend the viability of Gender
Studies as an institutional site in the academy, in the wake of post-structuralist scholarship that challenges the
stability of the categories ”gender” and “women.” First, I deconstruct a particular and persistent post-structuralist reading of gender and women in terms of identity construction. I then argue that gender studies is an important and distinctive area of inquiry, particularly when gender is the analytic focus, considering the fact that
while the field includes analyses of subject formations it is also about much more than this alone. Based in part
on my experience from 1998 to 2008 as the first tenured faculty member in the Department of Gender Studies
at Indiana University, this presentation is a partial account of how Women’s Studies has helped to transform
a number of disciplines to the point that “stand-alone,” transdisciplinary departments in Gender Studies make
sense as one important line of development, alongside ongoing, discipline-based scholarship and teaching
in Women’s Studies. As part of this account, I examine the institutional effects and politics of disciplinary
divides and traffic amongst disciplines. I also review ongoing debates about the name of the field. In keeping
with my claims about the need to focus on the capaciousness of gender as an analytic category, as opposed to
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a category of identity alone, I propose that “Gender Studies” marks a space that warrants institutional clout
because it signals attention to 1) the production of a range of gendered identities, and 2) dimensions of social
life that are gender-coded.
Eike Marten, Universität Hamburg, Germany
The Secret Lives of Concepts: German ‘Diversity Studies’ in the Making
‘Diversity’ as a relatively blurry term has gained astounding popularity in German accounts of difference and
alterity and their relation to questions of social inequality and discrimination. It appears both in the context of
current policies aiming at a management of diversity, as well as in texts proclaiming the current development
or necessity of ‘Diversity Studies’. In the latter ‘diversity’ functions as both an analytical perspective seemingly replacing concepts of difference, and as a normative attitude of appreciation of differences.
The proposed paper engages with the genealogy of ‘diversity’ as a conceptual term in relation to feminist
theories. I trace the genealogy of ‘diversity’ as it is portrayed in academic texts supporting the initiation of
‘Diversity Studies’ as a novel, integrative, interdisciplinary quasi-discipline in and across the humanities in
Germany. The story being told is one of a shared origin with feminisms. Thus authors gain authority to speak
about issues of emancipation, and simultaneously produce a narrative of (necessary) progress (similar to the
narratives Clare Hemmings described in her 2011 “Why Stories Matter”), while depicting feminism as an
anachronism. I read this storyline together with feminist writings on feminist histories in order to carve out dis/
continuities of story-telling between ‘Diversity Studies’ and feminisms. In a second move, I follow a parallel
genealogical branch in the self-description of ‘Diversity Studies’, which leads me to ‘Diversity Management’.
Two seemingly contradicting, yet related readings of the genealogy of ‘diversity’ emerge: One of an illegitimate appropriation of a distorted and reductive reading of feminist concepts and histories, and one of inescapable appropriation always already inherent in any concept of feminist knowledge production, no matter how
critical, benevolent, different. Simultaneously, this approach allows for a scrutiny of the conceptual meanings
of ‘diversity’ and their complicated relations to various concepts of difference.
Panel 3: Thinking Art I
Anu Koivunen, Stockholm University, Sweden
The Promise of Touch: Rethinking the Vulnerability of Spectators
In recent feminist theorizing, the notions of vulnerability and precariousness have emerged as key concepts
for thinking about power and agency, violence and openness, injury and transformability, ontology and epistemology, ethics and politics (e.g. Butler 2004, 2009; Brown 2005, 2006; Berlant 1997, 2011; Cavarero 2007;
Braidotti 2006). While highly divergent in their historical and philosophical legacies, the different approaches
to vulnerability and precariousness share an interest in vulnerability as the ontological or historical condition
or quality of human body.
In the fields of feministvisual theory and media studies, these conceptualizations of politics and ethics of
embodiment have resulted in reconceptualizations of spectatorship as a state of vulnerability. On the hand,
viewing is theorized as embodied engagement, as haptic or tactile practice or in terms of synaesthesia and multisensory experience. On the other hand, the interrelationship of viewers and images (sound-images) is being
interrogated as a dialogue or interaction. These powerful ideas are most visible in the important writings by
Vivian Sobchack (The Address of the Eye: The Phenomenology of Film Experience, 1992; Carnal Thoughts.
Embodiment and the Moving Image Culture, 2004) and Laura U. Marks (The Skin of the Film. Intercultural
Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses, 2000; Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, 2002) and,
more recently, by Jennifer M. Barker (The Tactile Eye. Touch and the Cinematic Experience, 2009).
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In this paper, I will provide a close-reading of Vivian Sobchack’s writings, tracing the emergence and effects
of her concept “cinesthetic subject” (2004) and contrasting her phenomenological approach to vulnerability as
a quality of viewers and films alike to the writings of Marks and Barker. The paper will address the following
questions: 1) What does it entail to think about film, TV or new media spectatorship in terms of vulnerability?,
2) What kind of research questions does it enable or foreclose?, 3) How does the notion of viewer as vulnerable re-activate and re-interpret the classic debates about active vs. passive viewing?
Lara Cox, University of Paris VII, France
Re-thinking a Politics of Sexual Difference: “French Feminism”, Cultural Translation, and “Free Fall” Cinema Stardom
Critics have often noted the exportation of “French feminism” into the Anglophone world as reduced to three
names of French theory: Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva. These theorists promote a view of
femininity predicated on sexual difference, which, more broadly, aligns itself with what Louise Burchill identifies as the self-destructive “French feminine” found in poststructuralist theory (e.g. Deleuze and Guattari’s
“becoming-woman”, Lyotard’s “Primordial Mother”, and Derrida’s, Kristeva’s and Irigaray’s investigations
into Plato’s primordial spatial matrix of the chora). As detractors have asserted, this trend of a global dissemination of the “French feminine” has been at the expense of the exportation of a wide body of materialist
feminism that was circulated domestically in France but never reached foreign shores (with the exception
of Monique Wittig’s work). Critics such as Christine Delphy, Eleni Varikas, and Monique Plaza have been
quick to condemn the international reduction of French feminism, pitting their own constructionist approach
against an essentialist conception of femininity propounded by Kristeva et al. This paper adumbrates a way
of rethinking the binary opposition that pits a constructivist, domestically circulated French feminism against
an essentialist, internationally exported counterpart by considering the transformative appeal of this version
of French gender in the international prominence of contemporary French female cinema stardom which John
Orr names “free fall”. The French free fall star has gained niche but nonetheless significant appeal in an international market through her performances in films in which star self-destruction, annihilation, and “ontological descent” (to quote Orr) are privileged. Emmanuelle Béart’s The Beautiful Troublemaker (Rivette, 1991),
Juliette Binoche’s Code Unknown (Haneke, 2000), Sandrine Bonnaire’s Vagabond (Varda, 1985), Béatrice
Dalle’s Betty Blue (Beineix, 1986), and Isabelle Huppert’s The Piano Teacher (Haneke, 2001) are just a few
examples of this trend. I will draw links between the cultural translation of French feminism and a female star
counterpart in an Anglophone setting and suggest the political mileage therein.
Rosemary Lucy Hill, Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York, UK
Researching Women Metal Fans and Conceptualising Fans as a Group: from ‘Subculture’, ‘Scene’ and ‘Fans’
to ‘Imaginary Community’
The aims of this paper are to argue that commonly used terms for theorising about music fandom are insufficient to investigate women’s experiences, and to develop the term imaginary metal community to enable discussion of pleasure in music fandom and structural sexism within the fan group. I address the question, what is
the most useful term for discussing women fans as part of a group without losing a sense of the pleasure in the
music itself? My doctoral research investigates the pleasures of hard rock and heavy metal fandom for British
women fans, and also the limitations that structural notions of two genders place upon that fandom. However,
common terms for metal fans as a group – fans, scene and subculture – are skewed towards male fans, meaning that women are necessarily diminished as fans in these studies. Nor can these terms account for both the
delights and the obstacles in metal fandom for women. This paper is set within the context of debates within
metal studies about the inclusivity of metal, and in popular music studies about the usefulness of particular
theoretical terms. I build upon the work of feminist popular music theorists, Cohen, McRobbie and Schippers,
to give a feminist critique of masculine hegemony in stories about rock music; and also upon the work of science fiction fan researchers and feminist critiques of community to argue that community is not a neutral term.
I draw on Anderson’s theorisation of the nation as an imagined community, arguing that it can be extended
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to develop the concept of the imaginary metal community. This concept allows for the consideration of how
women fans imagine themselves as part of a community without eliding the difficulties imposed by structural
sexism, and brings the focus back to the pleasure in the music.
Kristina Pia Hofer, Institute for Gender Studies, Johannes Kepler University, Austria
She-Devils that Matter: Thinking Excess in Feminist Studies of Exploitation Cinema
Exploitation cinema of the late 1960s is a genre of excess. It relies heavily on the sexualized display of difference (including, but not limited to, gender, sexuality, race and class), seeks to evoke visceral movements of
thrill, titillation and arousal, and employs an often trashy materiality that gives extensive room for lo-fi, lo-res,
the quick, the rough, the noisy. To date, feminist film studies have offered limited ways of engaging with these
productions. Three main possibilities emerge from the scarce literature. First, the literal reading of hyperbolic
representation as depicting and re-affirming real-life, hegemonic, heteronormative relations of power. Second,
the search for female authorship, as the marginalized, low-paying exploitation productions arguably provided
a different space for women’s artistic articulation than prestigious Hollywood. Third, a deconstructionist teasing out of fissures and ambivalences, or a ‘reading against the grain’ of heterosexist master narratives. All three
approaches mainly focus on exploitation cinema in terms of representation, without paying too much attention
to its affective and material dimensions. At the same time, however, underground art and pop cultural appropriations of exploitation modalities - as in the work of Jack Smith, John Waters, Meredith Lucas, Bruce LaBruce or The Cramps - suggest that it is exactly an engagement with material and affective excess that allows
to question central issues of feminist film studies (like power, privileges, agency, subjectivity, and pleasures
of looking and listening) beyond the usual binary ascriptions of gender and sex. This paper examines the lo-fi
soundtrack of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 1968 biker trash classic She-Devils on Wheels to suggests excess as
a concept that allows to think exploitation cinema in its historical and discursive dimensions, without losing
touch with its affective and material aspects.
Panel 4: Human Trafficking
Minna Viuhko, University of Helsinki; European Institute for Crime Prevention and Control (HEUNI), Finland
Human Trafficking and its Victims – Contested Concepts, Images and Realities
Human trafficking is a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon and a concept that refers to different forms of
exploitation of another person (for the purpose of sexual exploitation or prostitution; labour exploitation or
forced labour; removal of organs) carried out by certain actions and by certain means. Although human trafficking has been discussed, studied and debated widely during the past few years, there still exist plenty of
misleading images and stereotypes concerning trafficking, its victims and perpetrators.
Also, the concept of trafficking victim is somewhat vague. This paper reflects on the conceptual aspects of
human trafficking and victims of trafficking, and on the importance of using the right terms in the right connection. Being a victim is not an objective phenomenon; instead it depends on the situation and on the definitions used (Christie 1986). Thus, it is important how (potential) victims are defined and categorised, and who
is (and who is not) given the status of “victim”. And, moreover, even the use of the term “victim” needs to be
questioned. The “victims” do not necessarily identify themselves as victims, and often other people than the
“victims” themselves define who is a victim and who is not.
The concept of trafficking victim is usually related to female victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation.
However, on the one hand, female victims are victimised by other types and forms of trafficking as well, and
on the other hand, trafficking victims are not solely women but also men.
The presentation draws on the (ongoing) PhD study on transnational human trafficking and related exploita-
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tion. The study analyses the exploitation processes, their organisation and the control measures imposed on
the (potential) victims of trafficking and related exploitation. The data for the study consist of interviews of
experts, interviews of victims, court data and police pre-trial investigation material.
Zelia Gregoriou, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
“Did Not Want Abnormal Sex, Only Normal Sex; They Never Believe You…”
Abject Migrant Subjectivities, Discursive Gender Violence and the Production of “Identified” Victims
This paper examines the relation between dominant state/suprastate discourses on the combating of trafficking and forms of subjection [en]acted through state mechanisms for victim identification and migrant regimes
that render forms of female migrant desire and violence abject and unintelligible. The paper analyzes data
collected in the context of the three year European FP7 Research Program GEMIC (2008-2012). By combing
discourse analysis with life histories methodologies, I explore how discursive shifts in state policies (discourse
analysis) relate with forms of silence, normalization and excess in ‘victim’ narratives (life histories methodologies). The analysis shows that discontinuities and splits in suprastate and state discourses during the last
decade (exposing trafficking as a problem of gender equality and human rights, defying ‘trafficking monitoring’ as a mechanism of western hegemony, using victimization rhetoric to attain cultural resonance and
promote awareness raising, and disavowing the structural aspects of trafficking by focusing on “consent”) are
now eliminated as different stakeholders at various levels of governance embrace the framing of trafficking as
an international crime problem and tune their outcry and policy initiatives with the securitization of migration
and biopolitical control of/care for the society. In contrast to the discursive solidification of the ‘combating
trafficking’ policies, victim narratives remain dissonant, characterized by splits and contradictions which, on
the one hand, render victims unreliable court witness but, on the other hand, bear witness to the experience of
gender violence that is normalized though processes of “victim identification”, “giving account of one’s self”,
“victim protection” and establishment of “quality criteria for victim shelters”. The paper argues that the production of “recognized victims” implicates procedures which render impossible female migrant subjectivity,
aggravate state forms of gender violence and restage the securitization of borders through the materialization
and dematerialization of the female migrant sexual body. Finally, the paper suggests that new theorizations
of gender are needed in order to: (a) re-form the methodological intersectionality of migration, patriarchy and
gender violence from a question of structural oppression to a question of subjectivity, subjection and subjectification; (b) rethink the relation between gender, subjectivity and governmentality.
Anna Hollendung, Oldenburg University/Bremen University, Germany
Lost in the Discourse on Trafficking
Recent critics concerning the function of trafficking within the discourse on migration, indicate that the trafficking concept is prone to instrumentalisation. The notion of trafficking has been reviewed as giving a humanitarian-ethic cover to actions that combat (irregular) migration. Within the discourse of human trafficking
the victims are perseveratively defined on one side of gendered dichotomist configurations. Simplified, these
oppositions are e.g. victim – offender, innocence – prostitution, passivity – agency, deceived – informed,
vulnerable – dangerous, women – men, in need of protection – in need of punishment, and so forth. Such opposing definitions of trafficking vs. illegal migration are already seriously contested by some analysts (cf. Jo
Doezema 1998, 2000, Petra de Vries 2006, Dietmar Jazbinsek 2002, et al.) and blurred when tried to redefine
empirically (cf. Skilbrei & Tveit 2008, et al.). In addition to that, the polarizing effect caused by the notion of
trafficking places particular subject positions (e.g. the innocent virgin victim) in the center of the public attention. I suspect that the concentration on victims that epitomize the prejudgements bores on victims that do not
fulfill the expected role on one side of those dichotomies and therefore remain unseen.
In order to find another perspective, it appears to be required to leave the human trafficking frame somewhat
behind. Within recent political theories there are some hints that might help to reconfigure the subject within
the broader discourse on migration. With reference to Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak (1988, 1990), Judith Butler
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(especially 2004 & 2009), Hannah Arendt (2008) and Giorgio Agamben (in particular 2002) I will develop a
new concept in order to avoid the reproduction of the underlying effect of exclusion of those, who are neither
subjects nor objects of speech.
Laura Lammasniemi, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
Rethinking Pity and Victimhood – Representations of the Trafficked Woman
In this paper I will examine the politics of pity and victimhood in feminist research and in related campaigns
against trafficking in women. The sensationalist narrative of ruined innocence and beauty, rooted in the 19th
century white slavery movement, remain at the core of trafficking discourse and campaigns creating an image
of an idealized, often eroticized victim. The anti-trafficking organizations have placed the suffering female
body firmly on the political agendas across the world allowing states to create ever more restrictive immigration and sex work laws in the name of protecting the vulnerable but have done little to address the exploitation
of migrant sex workers. In the anti-trafficking discourse, personal narratives have replaced the truth and pity
has replaced methodology but the highly emotive language used has prevented the institutional discourse from
developing beyond the existing stereotypes of vulnerability and helplessness.
The constant representations of gendered violence and misery appeal to primary instincts to protect but in
language of pity rather than compassion. Pity as a response to suffering creates a social context where suffering of others is constructed by privileging the spectator and so, the division between those who suffer and
who observe the suffering is presupposed to maintain the power structures within the discourse. I will discuss
the operation of power and pity within the anti-trafficking campaigns and focus on the campaign posters and
representation of victimhood in these images.
Drawing from Hannah Arendt’s work on pity and compassion I will discuss the detrimental consequences
of relying on the politics of pity and whether compassion and solidarity could be used to reconceptualise the
trafficking discourse.
Panel 5: Thinking History
Berteke Waaldijk, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Troubling Concepts – Citizenship and Writing Histories of Feminism.
As a historian, I have written on historical connections between feminism and professional social work in Europe and the US. The discourse of professional social work in 19C and 20C is full of ‘race’, class, nation and
gender. I wanted to write about this without repeating that language. My intention was to do justice to feminist
social workers without taking over their often condescending attitude towards their clients. In a way I want
as a feminist historian to recover and save their ideals for the present. ‘Citizenship’ is a concept that I use in
this exercise. I have e.g. pointed out that pioneer social workers connected their own struggle for full citizenship as professionals with recognition of the citizenship of their clients. The concept of ‘citizenship’ seems
less contaminated than the national, racial, class- and gender-based prejudices that I find repulsive. Although
the professional social workers and feminists themselves hardly ever used the term, for me as a feminist historian the concept did the job of ‘translating’ of some of their historical ideas to the present of the 21C. In
this paper I want to reconsider the implications of this argument. For me the advantage of this concept is not
located in its quasi neutral, but in its problematic character. Feminist political and postcolonial theorists have
problematized the exclusionary gendered and racialized character of the idea of ‘citizenship’, as happened
with ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘nation’, ‘race’, etc. These critical reflections help me to make more sense of historical
feminist thought. As a historian looking for feminist politics in past that can be connected to feminist politics
in the present, I find looking for troubling (ambivalent, ambiguous and contaminated) concepts much more
helpful than a search to save ‘good’ feminists from bad historical surrounding surroundings. The discourse on
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citizenship can be as condescending and as exclusionary as national and racial chauvinism. That however is
no reason for historians or feminist theorists to search for other, innocent concepts to describe feminism. On
the contrary, I see it as an invitation to revisit other troubling concepts and their impact on feminism.
Mary-Lou Breitborde & Louise B. Swiniarski, Salem State University, USA
Power, Politics and Authority in the “Feminization of Teaching”
We propose a joint paper in the feminist studies of education on the concept of “the feminization of teaching”
and its relationship to power, professionalization and authority. The concept typically refers to the change
from “schoolmasters” to “schoolmarms” in American education, the idea that teaching is “natural” to women
and, sometimes, to a presumed negative impact on the education of boys. A more nuanced concept would
include not only gendered notions of power in teaching: power acceded to others, power accepted, and power
exercised in the immediate arena of classroom and school and the larger arenas of system management and
public policy. It would include also the philosophies, understandings, pedagogies and relationships that women bring to educational work.
Our presentation begins with demographic shifts in teaching at critical times in American history and the effect of its “feminization” on educational theory and the nature, structure and status of the work. To illustrate
the relationship of gender, power and politics in the context of history and biography, we will use the stories of
two women whose authority was significant but whose ability to resist prevailing narratives may have rested
in their removal from ordinary society: Elizabeth Peabody, leader of the kindergarten movement in the U.S.
and Laura Towne, founder of a school for freedpeople during the Civil War. While testament to the ability of
individuals to resist, their legacies were overshadowed by cultural forces saw women’s ways as inferior: once
included in the public schools, the kindergarten movement (of women) was devalued; the school that prepared
black professionals just removed from slavery was lost to institutionalized racism. It took union organizer
Margaret Haley to widen political prospects for women teachers. It may be that a “feminization of teaching”
concept that considers women acting in community is one that radicalizes the profession.
Tuula Juvonen, University of Tampere, Finland
Queering the ‘Lesbian’
In my presentation I am interested in the use of the concept ‘lesbian’ and its synonyms. I revisit their use both
in recent U.S. generated academic writing about lesbian past and in popular texts written by both lesbian identified women and non-lesbians in the 1970s and 1980s Finland.
Although U.S. generated academic writing gets widely published, circulated and cited, the assumptions conveyed by its use of ‘lesbian’ may be rather local, particular to that specific culture and time in question. As long
as these limitations are not recognized, it might make it difficult to have a meaningful conversation about the
lives women have lead in other contexts.
In order to see how far my fears can be confirmed I will first analyze texts about past lesbian lives published in
Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History, edited by Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Roque
Ramírez (Oxford University Press, 2012). What is the ‘lesbian’ in these texts?
Thereafter I contrast my findings with some of the textual materials on which I base my current research
project about Finnish culture. “Queer Narratives: Intimate and Social Lives of Women with Same-Sex Sexual
Attractions in Tampere 1971–2011” focuses on the emerging concept of a lesbian and those subcultures that
become available for women seeking sexual contacts with other women after the decriminalisation of lesbian
deeds. The texts I use to trace these processes include both mainstream papers (Hymy, Me Naiset), lesbian and
gay periodicals (96, Seta-lehti), and a lesbian magazine (Torajyvä).
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While focusing on the substance of both the concept ‘lesbian’ and its synonyms in these texts, I seek to find
out if the concept ‘lesbian’ refer to a similar phenomenon in both contexts, and if not, where the differences
are. In addition I contemplate on the kind of scholarly language that would be most helpful in conveying the
possible cultural discrepancy for an international readership.
Jia Zhen, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
In the Shadow: The Vague Existence of Female Masculinity in Chinese Women Journals in 1920s-1930s
In the long history of China, the existence of martial heroines, female outlaws and knight-errant(..) indicated
a special kind of women, whose physical strength, appearance and behavior exceeded the boundary of normal
women. Three elements raised my attention in searching materials: crossdressing, military service and intellectual achievements, which related to gender norm of the traditional patriarch society and were questioned in
the construction of a new paradigm for women started from late 19th century. In this paper, I will focus on the
texts in some important women journals in 1920s – 1930s China (the Republican controlled area when a flourishing of women journals took place, providing how female masculinity was manipulated in the national crisis1. Firstly, the author will discuss the definition of the concept, female masculinity first and related it to the
vague description in the narrative of martial heroines/knight-errant/female outlaws in Chinese texts. Then, the
paper will provide a brief introduction of women journals and the cultural context for the journals. Thirdly, the
author will relate the elements that could indicate female masculinity to the notions of “new women”/ “modern girls”. Some important figures in the history/literature and a few influential magazines will be introduced
in the analysis to examine if there was any difference when people talked about a legendary figure and women
in real life. 1 This is a very general description of the situation in 1920s-1930s China. Japanese intrusion was
imminent, and domestic wars kept China in chaos. However, other issues such as gender hierarchy in the new
nationstate with regard to the traditional heritage, the conflicts of different parties, and modernization..etc. also
contributed much to the complexity of early 20th century China.
Session 2
Panel 1: Concepts in Feminist Theory II
Eliza Steinbock, Maastricht University, the Netherlands
Raymond Williams’ Keyword: “Structures of Feeling” in TransFeminist Theory
Raymond Williams’ study of keywords throughout his career resulted in one of the founding texts of cultural
studies; it demonstrates a precise, concise etymological and historical analysis of seemingly neutral concepts.
One of Williams’ own coined keywords, “structures of feeling,” recurs throughout his writings, each time
shifting in emphasis, meaning, and use. This development makes it a prime case to conduct a keyword study.
Generally speaking, for Williams “structures of feeling” has great utility to track the culturally emergent, that
is, the changing collective experience, through the study of the arts. With art, experiences of feeling are not
an already formed and fixed whole, but “forming and formative processes”; thus, art provides visual and textual figures for articulating meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt. Williams stresses that an
analysis of structures of feeling can point out how affective elements stick to and seem to structure a historical
period or generation.
As Williams states in the introduction to Keywords, no review of shared vocabulary is free from political interest. Similarly, for the interdisciplinary scholar Mieke Bal, cultural analysis should involve accounting for the
concepts one employs (Travelling Concepts, 2002). Namely, this method enables inter---subjective discussion
across disciplines and interrogations of the assumptions of any usage. What disciplines does the concept of
“structures of feeling” cross---cut? What assumptions do the composite concepts “structure” and “feeling”
harbor that we should be wary of, or make use of? What does the concept do for us, to us, in an analysis of
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culture? My paper contribution to the conference situates “structures of feeling” in the cultural materialist tradition and in the current trajectory of the affective turn in feminist philosophy. I then reflect on my own political interests— TransFeminist—involved in bringing this concept into my research on “transgender feeling.”
Abigail Klassen, York University, Canada
On the Very Notion of Social Constructionism as an Emancipatory Tool
The emancipatory potential of social constructionism (SC) is supposed to lie in its function as critique - in its
revealing that elements of the social world thought to be natural and inevitable are really the products of social
attitudes and therefore, contingent. Some versions of SC claim that elements of the social world are amenable
to being improved or even discarded altogether, thereby improving the situation of, or emancipating, affected
individuals. In its “ameliorative” versions, SC projects change the debate from what X is, to what X ought to
be. A specter, which haunts such programs, is thus relativism: As parties declare their redefinition of some kind
X to be the most just and so forth, there may exist no standard by which to judge the better from the worse
other than by each group’s own lights. Factors that may be of influence include culture, gender, class, religion,
and so on. If relativism is indeed unavoidable, I ask whether it must be of the pernicious (aporetic and solipsistic) variety – the kind that repudiates the right of other groups to define and influence them and ends in “group
solipsism impervious to outside input” (Alcoff, Visible Identities, 2005, 35). Such a situation is aporetic in
the sense of leaving us at an impasse –there is nowhere to go and nothing to do. This question is particularly
apt in light of recent and renewed philosophical interest in the possibility of non-pernicious or emancipatory
relativisms (cf. Linda Martín Alcoff (2005), Lorraine Code (1995), Helen Longino (2003)). “Positive” relativisms attempt to proffer constructive or “enabling” (rather than purely negative and “immobilizing”) programs
(Code 1995, 196). In the spirit of Alcoff (2005), then, I ask not only whether solipsistic relativism is avoidable,
but whether it is even possible once the usual and perhaps descriptively and normatively bankrupt binaries of
self/other, intrinsic/extrinsic, objectual essence/relational or accidental property, and so forth are themselves
problematized and demystified by SC. Moreover, I ask whether non-pernicious relativism is a live and emancipatory possibility and what new problems this project may face.
Sanna Karhu, University of Helsinki, Finland
Norms and Violence in Judith Butler’s Work – Conceptual Distinctions
In recent feminist theorizations of “normative violence” many scholars (e.g. Lloyd 2012, Murphy 2011,
Chambers 2007) build their argumentation of the interrelation between norms and violence on Judith Butler’s thought. In these discussions the concept of ‘normative violence’ refers to the idea that norms governing
gender, sexuality, and race for instance can do violence to those who do not conform to them. As modes of
social power norms are understood to be violent by definition to the extent that their operation is based on an
exclusion of certain populations from the sphere of the “human”. Although these accounts bring an important
analytical level to the theorization of gendered and racialized violence, the relationship between normative
and physical violence is often muddled up and under-theorized. Consequently, this runs the risk of replacing
power with violence as an analytical concept with the result that it becomes more difficult to distinguish between modes of violence and coercive power.
The aim of this paper is to clarify the conceptual differences between ‘norm’, ‘power’ and ‘violence’ in Butler’s work. I will do this by juxtaposing Butler’s early understanding of the “violence of norms” developed in
Gender Trouble (1990) and “Contingent Foundations” (1992) with her more recent elaborations of the differences between ‘norm’, ‘power’ and ‘violence’ offered in Undoing Gender (2004) and Frames of War (2009).
On the basis of this analysis I argue that, firstly, there is a conceptual shift taking place between these texts:
while Butler uses the concepts of ‘norm’, ‘power’ and ‘violence’ often equivocally and even analogously in
her early texts, in her later work she provides more detailed distinctions between the concepts. Secondly, I
suggest that this explication of the conceptual changes in Butler’s thought can help to avoid totalizing understandings of violence in feminist theorizations of normative violence.
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Alja Adam, IRSA -Institute of Strategy and Development Analysis, Slovenia
Love as a Space of Variety – Between Deleuzian Philosophy and Feminist Theory
There are two sorts of love according to Deleuze’s statements; one which is marked by the attachment of the
desire to oedipal cleft stick and other which is being merged with unpredictable energy flow, which “penetrates through”, splits and circulates outside the codes of phallocentric functioning of the identity. First sort
of love springs up within molar social structure which imposes humans the most particular and specific under
the guise of universality, the other resides on molecular multiplications and thus strengthens singularity of the
subjectivities and their interaction and exchange. “Oedipus marked love” which has renewed itself and spread
through the myth of romantic love in Western cultural history suppresses person’s desires and prevents the
development of singular potentials. I will use Deleuzian concept of desire and his theory of love to critique
heterosexual sexuality and to point out that heterosexual norms strengthens the scheme of traditional gender
roles within which there is no place for improvisation. I will pointed out that love which is not trapped in “oeidipus circle”, enables movement of manifold desiring flows and opens space between individuals where various identity forms and non-normative positions of the subject are established. The love as a space of variety
expresses that “Two breaks One and tests the infinite situations«. I will define love as a space which enables
multiplication of various personal roles which are constantly redefined and reactivated and have nothing in
common with religious gender stereotypes and division on “purely female” and “purely male”. We unite one
another within the love relationship through various polysignificant meanings which are connected with creativity – and multiple subject positions.
Panel 2: Intersectionality II
Dennis Apolega, De La Salle University Manila, Philippines
Taking on a Role: An Actor-Oriented Approach to Discussing Gender and Introducing Intersectionality
Gender studies is a fledgling course for Philippine universities. This paper argues for an actor-oriented approach to the study of gender. By “actor-oriented,” it is meant that many of the activities are inspired or taken
from what actors do in order to prepare for a play. This approach is taken to bring the issues closer to the
students. For instance, activities used to deepen listening expose the problematic assumptions and stereotypes
regarding hypothetical situations. These hypothetical situations have to do with the interplay of gender, race
and social status. One hypothetical situation is that of a woman bleeding who is refused entry to a hospital. A
further description is that the woman has a swollen abdomen. The students are asked to give reasons as to why
the woman was refused entry. The added condition is that students repeat the reasons of the previous student.
Apart from students defending the hospital, the repeated reasons usually feature embellishments like “she was
poor”, “she’s of x-religion”, “she had an abortion.”
Listening is just one of the many basic skills nurtured even further by actors (especially those informed by the
practices of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Stella Adler) in order to be in the scene, from moment to moment.
This also means that listening is also an attempt to see through our own judgments. The insights that may be
gathered from doing the activities usually lead to discussions of intersectionality. It should be noticed that
gender, race, religion and social status also forms some of the elements in building a character, and many of
these dynamically intertwine and overlap. This paper also argues that the actor’s approach is also a good way
of introducing intersectionality, especially since this might be the first and last time our students will take up
gender studies.
Kadri Aavik, Tallinn University, Estonia
Using Intersectionality as a Theoretical-methodological Guiding Concept in Analysing Work Narratives:
Some Challenges and Opportunities
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Intersectionality is a theoretical concept and methodological approach that has attained an increasingly important position in the work of feminist scholars in the last two decades. Intersectionality suggests that, along with
gender, other socially constructed identity categories contribute to social inequality and thus gender (or any
other social division) should not be taken as sole or primary category through which to study social inequality.
However, while a valuable theoretical approach, interesectionality has introduced a variety of methodological
challenges and its empirical application has somewhat lagged behind.
In this paper, I first discuss, based on my research, how intersectionality can be used as a guiding concept and
the opportunities it offers for understanding employment narratives in the post-socialist context, where the
concept is still rather novel and infrequently used. Second, I discuss some methodological problems I have
encountered while studying narratives of employment experiences of Russian-speaking women and Estonian
men in Estonia using intersectionality as a guiding concept in my analysis. More specifically, I consider the
following issues relating to the use of the concept of intersectionality in analysing empirical data: how to
establish which social categories and their intersections are important in a given narrative and how do these
work to produce disadvantages and/or privileges for the subjects? What if particular social divisions are not
explicitly articulated by the research participants and perhaps are not important to them in rationalizing their
experiences, but are perceived by the researcher as important components of the participants’ narrated experience and identity? In other words, how to conduct intersectional analysis, when explicit references to social
categories are missing in the narratives?
Marjut Jyrkinen, University of Helsinki, Finland & Linda McKie, Durham University, UK
Gender Ageism: The Intersectionalities of Gender and Age
In this paper we address how gender and age are understood, reflected upon and conceptualised in worklife
and further in societies, and how age is and can become a problem for women – the phenomenon what we call
gendered ageism.
The intersections of gender, paid and unpaid work, and care, are significant issues in family, work and everyday life. These are rendered all the more complex as the organisation and delivery of care continues to be gendered. Women take on a disproportionate range and amount of care work both in and outside the workplace.
Interest in these issues will intensify as in many EU and post industrial economies the population ages. Given
the impact of demographic trends, along with a period of austerity, workers are encouraged to stay in employment for as long as possible to maximize their pensions and minimise calls upon the state. Further, in many
jobs, such as managerial positions, the pace of work is intensifying, ICTs creating fuzzy boundaries between
home and work, and thus careers demand ever more investment in both time and resources.
Age as such has no negative connotations necessarily for men: for instance, older men can be viewed as
‘statesmen’ like, as natural leaders combining wisdom with experience. Women of later years are rarely seen
in leadership roles and it is presumed unfeminine and unseemly for older women to be in global leadership
position. Women who are appointed to such roles are often the source of comment in terms of how they dress,
appear and behave. How they look can often cause more comment than their professional competence.
In a previous study of women managers in Finland and Scotland we found that in managerial roles to be
considered as woman, rather than a manager or a female manager, can carry connotations of incompetence.
With gendered ageism we refer to discriminatory actions, whether intentional or non-intentional, based on
the intersection of gender and age. For instance, comments on ‘menopausal problems’, even in her early 40s,
can be devastating to the woman’s career progress. Gendered ageism takes place also in the phenomena of
‘girling’, that is, infantalising women into powerless ‘dolls’ at all stages and ages. In addition to open gender
discrimination, there are other and much delicate forms of gender/ageist discrimination.
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Clara Selva, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain & Anna Vitores, Lancaster University, UK
Gendered Career Trajectories: Pitfalls and Challenges of the ‘Doing Gender’ Approach
This paper examines some difficulties and challenges of gender-based research when studying educational and
professional trajectories. Trajectories are usually understood as a sequence of stages which builds up one’s
educational and/or professional development and life. Research about the role of gender in these trajectories
has become central to understand why some professions and some positions within professions are still dominated by men. This kind of studies highlight the need to attend not only to institutional arguments or visible
discriminations but also to the social and cultural processes by which gender-specific identities, preferences
and expectations are generated.
Research of women either looking back upon their career path or just starting to think about an specific careerchoice provide critical knowledge of how paths and choices are shaped both by access to social, cultural and
economic resources and by being a member of a society that has different expectations for males and females.
The paper argues that what is still a challenge within this kind of work is to find out how to deal with gendered
trajectories and choices without naturalizing them into an underlying truth of gender.
At a conceptual level, this essentialism is destabilized by those studies that situate discourses and positioning regarding careers in the context of “doing gender” and “gender performance”. However, very often, even
when gender is theoretically defined by this “doing”, is dealt with as a fixed and evident construction. The
paper closes with discussing different ways of working with the concept of “doing gender” in empirical research about trajectories. Our final aim is to explore which analytical strategies could contribute to understand
in which sense educational and professional trajectories are gendered without being trapped in gender as a
stable and determining factor.
Keywords: Career trajectories, Gender, ‘Gender performance’, ‘Doing gender’.
Panel 3: Thinking Art II
Laine Kristberga, University of Latvia, Latvia
The Concept of Double Performativity in the Baltic Video Art
In this presentation I will focus on discussing the politics of gender representation as it is manifested through
the female body in video performances made by women artists in the Baltic States. I will analyse how the
concept of gender performativity as elaborated by Judith Butler can be appropriated when examining aesthetic
strategies used by women artists to make feminist statements in video art. Butler claims that gender is in no
way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed. Rather, it is an identity instituted
through a stylized repetition of acts, which bear similarities to performative acts within theatrical contexts.
Video performance, on the other hand, drawing heavily from the visual arts and nonconventional theatrical
representations, is a genre where women artists can raise issues of identity via performing and using their bodies as vehicles to convey a message. However, even in the most apparently chaotic performances or happenings, there is structural order and the performative act – even if improvisational – is intentional. This leads to
the concept of double performativity, because in these video performances both the gender and the “actor’s”
role are performed. Thus, producing and enacting oneself takes place at the same time and the distinction between art and life is reversed, confused and transcended. I will, thus, examine how the meaning is constructed
through specific corporeal acts in the particular video performances focusing on the bodily gestures, movements and enactments constituting the gender, as well as on the aesthetic strategies employed by the artists to
construct the portrayal of the body with encoded cultural meanings. Furthermore, I will question whether the
chosen representation strategies constitute an illusion of a gendered self and, if so, is there a conflict between
the concepts “to be a woman” and “to become a woman” in this aspect.
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Rosa Nogués, Kingston University, UK
The Body in Feminist Art Practice: New Approaches
The concept of the body constitutes for feminist art practice and criticism a central site of inquiry. Since its
irruption into art practice in the 1960s, the body of the artist has been a prime resource for artistic production
and critical reflection. And for feminist artists in particular, the female body offers some of the most fruitful
strategies for exploring and revealing the social construction of femininity in patriarchy, given that the representation of the female body as nude in Western art history has proven to be the epitome of the politically
invested nature of representation.
The problematic of the body in feminist art practice and theory is thus framed by the examination and critical analysis of the role played by representation in patriarchal society in reinforcing and legitimising specific
gender roles, a vital concern for feminist cultural theory. From a theoretical perspective, this problematic has
been overdetermined by a conceptual dichotomy between a phenomenological understanding of the body and
a psychoanalytic one. And thus, the institutionalised narrative of feminist art posits an opposition between,
on the one hand, feminist artists who embraced the use of their bodies relatively uncritically in a celebration
of what they understood to be a primary, corporeal femininity untouched by patriarchal bias, and on the other
hand, those who refused its representation altogether, arguing that the image of the naked female body was
always already mediated by patriarchy, the fetishised materialisation of women’s subjected position in patriarchy, and that the claim of a natural givenness for femininity in the bodies of women was precisely patriarchy’s
rationalisation for women’s oppression.
In my paper I will examine the precise articulations of the concept of the body in feminist art practice and
extricate the problematic from the misleading theoretical opposition in which it has been embedded. Given
that the body continues to constitute a central element in feminist art practice, my paper will set out from the
premise that the possibilities for understanding this strategic use of the female body have not been exhausted,
and that a continued engagement with this problematic can offer new ways of approaching a conceptualisation
of the body from within feminism.
Beverly Sarza, De La Salle University-Manila, Philippines
Framing Feminist Art Criticism: A Wittgensteinian Approach to the Problem of Representation
One of the topics that feminist art criticism discusses is how women are used as images or subject matters of
artworks. Basically, it attempts to investigate how women and femininity are defined through representations
in artworks that are primarily created by men. This paper holds that such endeavor can be rendered insufficient
without first addressing the problem of representation or “How does X (image) represent Y (subject)?” With
this, the author attempts to fill in said gap by solving the problem of representation with the use of a Wittgensteinian framework before delving into the question of how women and femininity are represented in works
of art.
This article suggests an approach appropriate for feminist art criticism that considers “representation” through
the notion of family resemblances—a term that does not have a single definition. In this regard, “representational visual artworks” are those that can be referred to as any of the following conditions: (1) x (an image
can represent y (subject) if x has the logical form of y, (2) x can represent y if both have the same logical
multiplicity, and (3) x can represent y if y possesses the laws of projection of x. Consequently, artworks are
representational in varying degrees depending on the number of said conditions they happen to possess. If applied in feminist art criticism, it makes the investigation or inquiry on the representation of women as images
in artworks more meaningful and contextual.
Keywords: philosophy of art, analytic aesthetics, Wittgenstein, representation, feminist art criticism, visual
arts
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Saara Jäntti, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Madness and/as difference. Diagnostic Choices in Women’s Writing on Madness.
In feminist literary theory, feminist critique of psychiatry and feminist psychology the term “madness” has
played a crucial role. It has been a key concept in the analysis of the role of culture and culturally defined
gender roles in psychiatric practice. Madness continues to function as a kind of umbrella term for conditions
that are treated by a growing body of therapies and psychosciences, and in the cultural studies and history of
psychiatry its value is unquestioned. At the same time, however, the number of psychiatric diagnoses continues to grow - and so does the number of women who identify with and write their pathographies through these
diagnoses.
This paper examines the uses of madness in feminist theory, and explores the implications and impact of diagnostic choices in women’s madness narratives. It will provide an overview of the ways in which madness and
difference can intersect with one another in analysis - and examines the purposes that different conceptualizations of madness can serve in writing about - and living with - madness. By focusing on the developments in
women’s published, autobgiographical madness narratives in English after the Second World War, the paper
seeks to provide a framework for understanding madness and/as difference as culturally and historically shifting notions.
Panel 4: Feminist Movement and Feminist Agency
Johanna Oksala, University of Helsinki, Finland
Feminist Politics of Inheritance
In his book Specters of Marx (2006) Derrida puts forward the idea of a politics of memory and suggests that
politics is not concerned solely with the future, but crucially also the past. In this paper I ask what such a politics of memory would mean for feminism.
I begin by critically studying Wendy Brown’s (1995) influential argument against any feminist attempt to
turn to a shared history of suffering as a source of collective identity. Brown appropriates Nietzsche’s idea of
ressentiment to argue that feminist attachment to the injured identity of “woman” is predicated on and requires
its sustained rejection by a hostile external world. Forms of solidarity built on it will therefore necessarily lead
to political impotence and defeatism.
In the second section I turn to Walter Benjamin in order to critically investigate the unacknowledged views on
history that underlie our political commitments. I argue that instead of simply forgetting and letting go of our
“wounded attachments”, feminism must rethink its relationship to historicity. The dispersal of history as a unified and linear narrative of progress signals a possibility of rethinking our past in a way that is able to redeem
our politics against charges of ressentiment.
Carly Joanne Guest, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
Uneasy Identifications
This paper considers the use of the psychoanalytical concept of ‘identification’ and the reflections and dilemmas its use prompted in the analysis of one woman’s account of ‘becoming feminist’. Rebecca, the participant
whose account is under discussion, was interviewed as part of research into women’s stories of ‘becoming
feminist’. The concept of identification was used to reflect on Rebecca’s relationship with her dead feminist
mother and the political, generational and geographical temporalities of her childhood. Paying particular attention to identification as intersubjective, the concept allowed consideration of both the relationship between
Rebecca and her mother, between Rebecca and the researcher and the researcher and the familial figures in
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her own feminist story. Its use encouraged reflection on the ways in which the numerous relationships active
in any account of a life impact on the analysis of that account. Whilst the concept of identification opened up
avenues for reflexivity, it also posed a challenge to a researcher who previously resisted the use of psychoanalytical concepts for the analysis of research interviews. This paper considers how use of the concept of
identification raised numerous questions regarding the power dynamics of research interviews, the meaning of
ethical research and the on-going ethical relationship and responsibility a researcher has to their participants.
It asks; how do the concepts we use to interrogate our participants’ accounts position them and ourselves in
particular ways? How do the concepts we use to talk about other’s interested stories create and reflect interested stories of our own? Are there ethical implications of interpreting another’s account of their life through
particular theoretical lenses? The uneasy adoption of the concept of identification prompted the interrogation
of not only the participant’s account, but the researcher’s positioning, the numerous relationships that impact
on an analysis and of the research process itself.
Mohammed Yachoulti, Miohammed Ben Abdellah University, Morocco
Moroccan Feminist Movement Since 1930s
Tracing the history of Moroccan feminist movement is a fascinating exercise. The fact is attributed to three
main reasons. First, despite the affinities it has with both the Western and Middle Eastern feminist movements, it remains different from both of them because of its historical and socio-cultural backgrounds. Second,
whether it is a Moroccan originality or an attempt to control its dynamism and scope, feminist movement in
Morocco has always been an instigation of the state. Third, the establishment of Moroccan feminist movement
has gone through different historical periods and stages punctuated by changes in the socio-economic and political scenes of the country. Interestingly, through its historical activism, Moroccan feminist moment has not
only acquired enough experience concerning organization but also managed to politicize Moroccan women’s
issues and ‘discralize’ taboos that are deeply-rooted in the Moroccan mind and culture. Nowadays, Moroccan
feminist movement’s gains are evident at different levels and stand as an example worthy of modeling in the
region. Following a historical approach, in addition to the techniques of document analysis and visits to the
organizations that make up the Moroccan women’s movement and interviews, this paper digs into the history
of the movement and investigates its specificity. The paper starts from the assumption that the experience
of Moroccan feminism remains unique in form, dynamism and gains. Indeed, the importance of this paper
resides in the fact that it in sheds light on another understanding of the historical trajectory of the movement
and its direction. Also, bringing such an issue to the surface would help in a better understanding of state’s
politics and strategies of government in Morocco.
Christian Niculae Ciobanu, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, USA
Evaluating the Conception of Agency for Iranian Women
This paper draws upon Saba Mahmood’s theoretical framework developed in the Politics of Piety: The Islamic
Revival and the Feminist Subject (2005) to argue that religious Iranian female activists helped to establish
new forms of agency for women. As discussed in the paper, these new forms of agency enabled them to instill
a Lockean type of moral responsibility among the broader Iranian community about the urgent need to challenge the Islamic Republic of Iran`s application of patriarchal norms on women. This paper further relies on
secondary sources to investigate how the conception of agency for Iranian religious females has evolved from
the 1980s to the late 1990s by examining their decisions to use Islamic rituals, newspapers, and magazines,
including Jalaseh prayer meetings, Rouzame Zan and Zanan, to question the application of prevailing societal
norms on women. Consequently, this paper demonstrates that these rituals and mediums have created a discursive space in which religious women have been able to age with other female and male members of Iran`s
society and selected clerical leaders on a variety of issues for women, including the ability to divorce their
husbands. Finally, the paper shows that the ability of these religious women to exercise their agency through
these means has enabled them to gain limited social successes in Iran, which helped them to create avenues
through which they slowly changed the Islamic Republic of Iran`s societal norms regarding Iranian women.
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Panel 5: Feminist and Queer Struggles
Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Finland
The Conceptual Politics of Pride in Queer China
The notion of ‘pride’ and the anti-discrimination politics it heralds, is integral to LGBTQ liberatory discourses throughout the world today. Pride discourse and the practices it involves, such as marches, festivals,
and way of life, is increasingly contested. Claims of inapplicability outside Euro-American urban centers,
and a predominant assimilation agenda that excludes the original politics against social stigma and promotes
anti-discrimination and equality, resonate in many parts of the world. In the current moment, many Chinese
LGBTQ activist networks advocate pride and equality but use strategies less confrontational and political in
order to minimize risk of official censorship. Based on ongoing anthropological research on queer Chinese
movements, and drawing on critical queer anthropology and queer of color scholarship, this paper argues for
the importance of empirical, embodied analyses of queer cultural politics in academic theorizing.
Alexander Kondakov, Centre for Independent Social Research, Russia
Queer Theory Serving Social Science and Politics
In this paper, I want to show how basic assumptions of what is known now as ‘queer-theory’ contribute to conduct
social research and advocacy politics in Russia. First, I would illustrate how queer theory is conceptualized outside
Russian academic and political fields to find out later on if there are commonalities with the situation in Russia. Second, I want to draw attention to two different uses of ‘queer-theory’ in Russia: in marginalized academic research
and in the advocacy strategies of LGBT-organizations. On the one hand, queer enters into the academy especially
in gay and lesbian studies, conducted by independent researchers. On the other hand, there is a certain resistance to
queer from the official academic institutions, bound by the state conservative politics. I want to show how the use
of the concept of ‘queer’ helps researchers to speak up about marginal topics. In a sense, ‘queer’ substitutes other
wordings when researchers speak about homosexuality (such as ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay’) in order to confuse the conservative colleagues who are not yet aware of queer. Similar situation may be found in grassroots politics: Russian lesbian
and gay associations actively use ‘queer’ in their advocacy, organizing ‘queer-culture festival’ and ‘queer-identity
coming-out days’. What do they all mean by ‘queer’? And how this meaning is related to the use of ‘queer’ in other
contexts? I want to present a sociological analysis of queer in contemporary Russia.
Joanna Mizielinska, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland &Agata Stasinska, Warsaw University, Poland
Family and/or Love: How do Certain Concepts Work in Different Geo-Temporalities? Polish Case
There has been a visible shift in a recent LGBT politics in Poland from coming out politics to the politics
underlining the subjectivity of non-heterosexual relationship (Kulpa, Mizielinska, Stasinska 2012). The transition occurred in many different levels (activism, grassroot social campaigns, voices of LGBT people) and as
such it calls into question politics that copies Western (U.K.-USA) ideas of LGBTQ emancipation. There is a
need to analyze this turn but also to ask about love and family as political concepts of LGBT/queer activism.
In our presentation we would like to engage in the discussion on love and family/kinship politics which has
been recently developed in the Western political theory and queer theory (Berlant&Warner 1998, Butler 2002,
Boelstorff 2007, Hardt&Negri 2009, Halberstam 2012) and attentively confront it with Polish reality. Is the argument of Western scholars who claim that love can only be a powerful political concept when separated from
family (Berlant&Warner 1998, Hardt 2007,) adequate in Polish context where the meaning of kinship/family
and love is firmly linked with specific geo-temporal specificity of the region (Kulpa&Mizielinska 2011)? What
could be queer in referring to love/family/kinship in post-communist time and space? While addressing these
question we will use examples from Polish reality, reflecting upon our own research on ‘families of choice”
(Mizielinska 2011-2015) and sexual politics and strategies of LGBT/queer activism (Stasinska 2012- 2015).
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Linda Hart, University of Helsinki, Finland
The Concept of Family, Law and Human Rights: Towards a More Inclusive Singular Concept
This presentation focuses on the concept of ‘family’ and its usages in contemporary international human rights
discourse. Depending on the underlying world view and politics of the utterance in question, the concept of
family may be monopolised to refer to a building block of society that can only be formed on a heterosexual
relation, preferably sanctified by (religious) marriage. On the other hand, due to the emergence of civil partnerships, same-sex marriage and various possibilities of family formation through adoption and assisted procreation and the politics underpinning these developments have brought a different, more inclusive conception of family to the fore. The presentation relates to an ongoing PhD study that has taken case law from the
European Court of Human Rights as its empirical material. The study in question analyses, inter alia, changes
that have taken place in how the European Court views the concepts of ‘family’ and ‘family life’, and how a
politico-moral concept that used to be very exclusive in the past has slightly opened up to be more inclusive
due the political developments mentioned above (see, e.g. Schalk and Kopf v. Austria). It has been a sociological commonplace to speak of families in the plural to denote their multiplicity. Following Rosalind Edwards
and Val Gillies (2012), the presentation dwells on the possibility of revitalising the concept in the singular
without losing the recently achieved inclusive political breadth of the concept.
Friday 24 May
Session 3
Panel 1: Concepts in Feminist Theory III
Heta Rundgren, Université Paris 8 / University of Helsinki, France / Finland
Queer and Feminine (Butler & Cixous) – in Third Terms?
Most queer or/and feminist theorists would no doubt associate the concepts of feminine and queer to different,
if not opposing traditions in contemporary feminist thought. There exists no doubt a historical-linguistic “gap”
between these concepts, seeing how queer is put forth in English in the beginning of 1980s, and feminine in
French in the 1970s. In other words, an emphasis on queer, lesbian and gay rights in the former might be said
to replace a stress put on feminine and women rights in the latter. However, I propose to concentrate on some
important affinities between these notions, and to do this by reading in particular Hélène Cixous’ and Judith
Butler’s work. I will draw from Cixous’s 1975 texts “The Laugh of the Medusa” and “Sorties” on the one
hand, and from Butler’s 2004 essay “The End of Sexual Difference?” on the other hand, and I will play with
– as a monstrous third hand – some quotes from Jacques Lacan-Derrida. I will particularly focus on the articulations and expressions of these feminist thinkers around bisexuality and monstrous or unintelligible subjects.
I will also pay attention to the fact that both queer and feminine are – in the bodies of writing I will examine
– notions processed and theorized in “cultural translation” and through and in a politics of writing that resists
“common sense” or affirmative syntax, indeterminates or disrupts meaning and mixes different genres. This
latter claim is also readable in the fact that both feminine and queer have been especially fruitful in feminist
literary theory and that institutionally both Cixous and Butler are affiliated to departments of literature.
Carola Häntsch, University of Greifswald, Germany
“The Feminine” – The “Basic Concept” of Feminist Theorizing?
In my paper I am firstly going to deal with the concept of the concept (Begriff des Begriffs) as it is developed
in the Philosophy of Sign of the German philosopher Josef Simon. According to Simon we understand each
other by using and interpreting signs. This includes that the “meaning” of signs (and also of concepts) arises
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only by using it. In communication signs are always used by individuals and under concrete conditions of
space and time (individuality and temporality of the use of concepts), which is why their meanings differ
from individual to individual and from situation to situation. Nevertheless we understand each other while e.g.
using the sign “human being”. Simon is making a difference between signs and concepts: concepts however
can be seen as some kind of “frozen signs”, stabilized definitions for some time and some users. Whenever a
new participant is going to enter the discourse the definite meaning of a concept can or must change as Plato
demonstrates in his dialogues.
Secondly I am going to ask what does this mean for the concept of “the feminine”, “feminity”? Can we understand and accept the concept of “the feminine” as a sign or a basic concept of feminist theorizing, as a counter
concept e.g. to “masculinity”? What did, what do people understand by this word? Why is there some trouble
for “feminists” to define “the feminine”? May be there is a problem in the –ism?
Dennis Bruining, Macquarie University, Australia
Somatechnics: The Technics of Matter
Much contemporary feminist theory is concerned with thinking materiality anew. Quite often the argument in
these ‘new materialist’ works consist of the following gesture: ‘you should rethink materiality because you are
postmodern and/or poststructuralist, which means you do not account for the matter of things.’ My concern in
this paper is based on the reason behind this claim and on the truth of this reason.
I raise this point because it seems to me that this ‘founding gesture of the new materialism’ has led to a strange
paradox in these attempts to re-think ‘matter’. Whilst there is an emphasis on the inextricability of matter and
discourse and on the impossibility of theorizing matter as such in these works, much new materialist writing
(inadvertently and contradictorily) seems to reify matter as a priori. In this paper, I want to elucidate what enables such theorizing by looking at how the term ‘new materialism’ spawns a paradoxical reconceptualization
of materiality and thus undermines its own aims.
Drawing on Nikki Sullivan, I argue that ‘new materialism’ is informed by a specific, situated perception: a
way of looking that is always-already determined and which, simultaneously, determines how something is
perceived (and that something is perceived in the first place). Given this, I want to juxtapose the ‘new materialist’ idea of agential material (or agentive matter) with somatechnics, a term that highlights the contingent
ways in which matter comes to matter, or to put it differently, a conceptual tool that, I contend, replaces a ‘new
materialist’ vision of agency at the heart of matter with technology instead.
To think materiality anew, then, means to fully embrace the inextricability of ‘matter’ and the technologies in/
through which ‘matter’ comes to matter.
Sari Irni, Åbo Akademi University, Finland
“Sex Hormones” and/in Politics: Notes for a Political History of Sex
From the perspective of material feminism and feminist technoscience studies it is possible to suggest that
nonhumans, including sex hormones, are actants (Latour) in society, or active agents rather than “mere” constructions of science (Barad). In Feminist Theory it has been disputed that focusing on nonhumans would be
a “worrying turn away from the more traditional grounds of feminist theory and politics”, and that instead,
feminists can come to recognise how nonhumans can “be constituted and thought in and through particular
worlds in which ‘we humans’ are but one nominated set of players” (Hird & Roberts 2011: 115). This paper
explores what such comments can mean in relation to sex hormones and/in politics. This entails two interrelated questions about concepts. One of them concerns the notion of sex hormones, and the other, the nature of
the actor or actant who/which can be claimed to contribute to politics. If political thinking means “seeing the
contingency of things” (Pulkkinen 2011: 37), is it possible to think politically about nonhuman actants such as
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sex hormones? Moreover, if sex hormones are considered actants and also active (in politics!), what can that
mean in practice? Specifically, how to think of the phenomena termed “sex hormones” in relation to writing
political histories of sex in Finland? Are there ways in which sex hormones can be understood as active in a
study of history? How do sex hormones move to being part of, for example, disability politics, sports politics
or reproductive politics, where sex hormones seem to be intertwined (Irni forthcoming)? How to study actants
which transform into various technoscientific products and practices on the way? Is it, and in which sense,
meaningful to say that “nonhumans”, such as “sex hormones”, contribute to political practices, and what is the
difference from saying that “science” contributes?
Panel 2: Intersectionality III
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, University of Cambridge, UK
The Intersection of Gender, Class and Sexuality in Informal Prostitution in Britain, 1980
This paper explores the concept of intersectionality, examining the transcript of an unpublished interview
conducted by a sociologist in January 1980 with a teenager in a southern port town in England who had sexual
encounters with sailors and received taxi money, drinks and gifts in exchange. Victoria Harris, author of an
important work on the experiences of prostitutes in Weimar Germany and the Third Reich, has suggested that
it is not always appropriate to treat prostitution within the context of the history of sexualities.1 In this case,
however, it is impossible to interpret this young woman’s actions and her explanations of her behaviour outwith the context of national and local youth cultures of sexuality and rebellion. This paper thus explores the
ways in which gender and sexuality intersected in this young woman’s life. Examining how class intersected
with gender and sexuality during a time of painful economic recession in Britain to produce specific attitudes
towards sexual activity – and its possible material rewards – allows for a more nuanced historical approach
to prostitution. This paper thus explores how intersectionality operated in practice, focusing on gender, class
and sexuality to explore how informal markets of prostitution could be experienced by some young women in
ambivalent, sometimes positive, sometimes negative ways.
Victoria Harris, ‘Sex on the margins: new directions in the history of sexuality’, The Historical Journal, 53,
2010, pp. 1085-104, at p. 1288.
Franca Bimbi, University of Padua, Italy
Gender. From the Women Studies to a Feminist Epistemology on Domination and Freedom.
This paper aims at approaching some crucial themes from the viewpoint of a feminist epistemology that is
oriented to a sociological interpretation of contemporary societies. We present here a personal interpretation
of the Bourdesian approach on the “masculine domination” considering the reproduction of symbolic violence
against women under the “regime” of women’s freedom and of gender de-construction in a neo-colonial Europe of the globalized migrations. Especially we are concerned with the risk of a racialization of the genderbased violence through the emphasis on “our” rights, in the European discourse and in the Italian Feminism
too.
In feminist epistemology women’s historical and social experience is a necessary premise to the interpretation
of social dynamics. However, the proposition of its own internal heterogeneity implies an admission of partiality and relative sidedness of the assumption which, while trying to assert itself, cannot but distance itself from
any anthropology of identity or politics of truth, following a deconstructive method. These considerations
show the meaning of meta-narration in contemporary feminist epistemology: it is closely concerned with the
domination-freedom relationship, which is nowadays the individual’s dilemma par excellence. For women,
the dilemma is between protection and caring, subjection and seduction: these are the forces regulating, reproducing and partially solving gender contracts, patriarchal and post-patriarchal configurations in public and
private relations, the ways in which and the extent to which the female body is accessible to men.
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By looking from a sociological perspective of the feminist debate around social conflicts on crucial aspects
such as caring, time, money, body, procreation, sexuality, I mean to highlight the cruces and reconfigurations
of gender relationships in globalized European societies, where the intersection between gender, race and social class seems to advance various dual political constructions, among which the old “tradition-modernity”
dichotomy.
Key words: Gender, Masculine Domination, Feminist Epistemology
Marina Morrow, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Women and Madness Revisited: Writing against Biopsychiatry
There is now an established literature documenting the ways in which psychiatry pathologizes femininity and
racialized groups and is used as a form of social control. Psychiatric diagnostic practices medicalize normal
reactions to living in a sexist/racist culture (e.g., the effects of violence), have been used to actively suppress
social activism (e.g., the civil rights movement) (Metzl, 2009) and to label normal female life transitions (e.g.,
menopause, the perinatal period) (e.g., Ussher, 1991; 2011).
And yet, feminist scholars/activists writing against biopsychiatry, while trying to make meaningful social
change, struggle with the limited conceptual frameworks available to describe mental states and experiences
of mental distress. Ussher (2005), in her articulation of a “material-discursiveintrapsychic” approach, has perhaps come closest to providing a framework that captures the tension between wanting to both acknowledge
women’s individual experiences of psychic pain while not reinforcing strictly biomedical understandings of
the origins of this pain. Still, examples of how to apply this framework and the attendant struggles with language that re-inscribes the dominance of psychiatry are lacking. This problem becomes even more vexing in
the contemporary political context in which neoliberal discursive framings of mental health abound in both
policy and health practice. Neoliberalism handily props up biomedicalism, creating an almost impenetrable
discursive wall that naturalizes ‘mental illness’.
Through the use of several contemporary mental health policy related examples, this paper explores the current discursive regime in mental health and the ways in which it props up structural and systemic forms of oppression -sexism,racism, colonialism - and notably, sanism. Intersectional feminist frameworks in conjunction
with frameworks emerging from mad studies are offered to explore alternative ways of naming mental distress
and the power invested in psychiatry.
Ulrike Prattes, University of Western Sydney, Australia
Responsiveness and Responsibility. The Case of Domestic Service
The aim of this paper is to discuss the concepts of responsiveness and responsibility in regard to the contemporary global organization of domestic service.
Domestic service is today organized along axes of gender, class, “race”, ethnicity and citizenship, to name but
a few. Feminist engagement with the field of “outsourced” domestic work that took place over the past few
decades has undoubtedly raised awareness on a broader scale for the global asymmetries that have become
constituent elements of this kind of work. The majority of these scholarly works focuses on the particular interdependences between female employer and female domestic worker. Yet, this focus runs risk to feed into the
portrayal of underlying societal issues as “women’s problems”. I therefore argue that responsiveness towards
the female (migrant, classed, ethnicized, racialized) “Other” – though essential – will not suffice to annul the
hierarchical power relations within the field of domestic service and is moreover impotent to substantially alter
the situation of those most vulnerable within this structure. Outsourcing reproductive work to marginalized
Others not only reinforces various axes of hierarchization: it disguises the still gendered connotation of and
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responsibility for domestic work, a pivotal point at the messy intersections within which domestic service is
performed. We can only truly become responsive and understand the role gender plays within this field, if we
also look at what bodily present men do both in domestic work consuming households as well as domestic
workers.
Just as we have to vigilantly interrogate migration regimes, and the cultural valorisation of (paid) work(-aholism) and the dichotomization of care and work in order to better the unequal power relations within domestic
service, we cannot become responsive to each other nor enter relationships of responsibility as long as we
remain deaf to the complex ways in which reproductive work remains feminine connotated.
Panel 3: Difference and Politics
Venla Oikkonen, University of Helsinki, Finland
Rethinking Evolution, Movement and Difference
During the past decade, feminist scholars have turned to evolutionary theory in order to address key questions
of feminist theory. These issues include sexual difference, the mutability of desire, as well as the more general
questions of ontology and materiality. For example, Elizabeth Grosz and Claire Colebrook have found Deleuzian ideas of becoming in Darwin’s writing, and Luciana Parisi and Jami Weinstein have further elaborated on
the constitutive role of gender and sexuality in evolutionary processes. My paper arises from two observations.
First, these feminist readings of Darwin understand evolution as primarily temporal movement. However,
evolution is also spatial movement, as speciation and variation emerge from geographical distance. Second, in
these feminist readings, the ontology of sexual difference and desire appear as largely apolitical. Yet Darwin’s
idea of evolution has generated fierce political debates about progress/regress and racial hierarchies.
My presentation seeks to complicate feminist readings of evolution as becoming by examining evolutionary
processes as not only temporal but also spatial. In order to do so, I turn to population genomics, the study
of genetic variation within and between populations. Population genomics has produced maps of the prehistoric movements of human populations, as well as mapped human variance on the genomes of contemporary
people. Crucially, these acts of mapping are deeply involved in ongoing cultural debates about the nature of
human differences. I argue that by bringing together spatial (geographical) movement traced by population
genomics and temporal movement inherent in natural and sexual selection, we may address the ontological
underpinnings of not only gender and sexuality, but also ethnicity. Most importantly, a critical examination
of the mutual embeddedness of temporal and geographical movement in evolutionary processes renders the
ontology of gender, sexuality and race an urgent political question.
Lenart Škof, University of Primorska, Slovenia
Breathing the Sexual Difference: On Two Irigarayan Feminist Concepts
According to Heidegger, each age has one issue to think through. For Irigaray, the issue of our age is that of
sexual difference. This issue has been recently accompanied with an awareness that the task of philosophy
is to awaken humanity to the new ethical constellation: one where our cultures will allow new ethical spaces
of difference to arise and where our ethical sensibilities will be transformed. As described in her seminal text
“The Age of Breath”, this awakening of humanity is related to the breath of the life we receive and share.
Breath/ing is undoubtedly the most forgotten and neglected aspect to all cosmological and bodily phenomena.
In our lecture, we will first focus on the importance of the topic of breath in Irigaray’s work. We will show the
presence of this material ‘concept’ in her works since The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (1983). But it
is in Luce Irigaray’s middle and later works, such as Between East and West, The Age of the Breath, Sharing
the World and her recent Il Mystero di Maria (2010) and Una nouva cultura de l’energia (2011), that a new age
of breath is announced for the future. From her philosophy of sexual difference as a topos of dialectics of two
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autonomous and breathing subjects, we will trace a development of her radical ethics and politics of breath/
ing. For Irigaray, breathing is a medium for my coexistence with the other in and with nature. It is a physical
and spiritual interchange of cosmic/natural/material energies that inaugurate a new circle of love and peace,
posited as a horizontal rather than a vertical transcendence. Finally, on a basis of our analyses, we will propose
a new platform for ethico-political thinking, one that could also secure the place for the new politics of justice
and peaceful coexistence.
Maria Svanström, University of Helsinki, Finland
Sexual Difference Philosophies, Dialogue, and Political Theory
Sexual difference philosophies have remained marginal in the field of political theory – despite the fact that
they form a rich and multidisciplinary debate that provide fresh perspectives into contexts where questions of
power are taken seriously. In the presentation it will be shown that the contributions on dialogue by sexual difference philosophers as Adriana Cavarero and Luce Irigaray offer valuable perspectives into political theory in
their attempt to exceed the dichotomy between the individual and the collective so dominant in the field. This
is interesting especially from the point of view of the debate on communication and democracy very popular
in political theory today. By comparing how intersubjectivity is conceptualized by sexual difference philosophers and defenders of deliberative democracy, different methodological tools in conceptualizing democracy
and dialogue will be crystallized. By discussing Cavarero and Irigaray together with Rosi Braidotti it will also
be shown that even though the relation between two subjects is a theme that has gained considerable amount
of attention among sexual difference philosophers, it is not a theme that all sexual difference philosophers
embrace. Despite this, common features among sexual difference philosophers can be found. The aim of the
presentation is to show both advantages and possible problems in discussing democracy and dialogue with the
vocabulary provided by sexual difference philosophers.
Heini Kinnunen, University of Helsinki, Finland
The Concept of Public Sphere and the Feminist Critique of Public/Private Distinction in the Works of Iris
Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, and Seyla Benhabib
Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, and Seyla Benhabib are among the most influential contemporary feminist
theorists who have operated with and developed the concept of public sphere in their works. One of their core
feminist criticisms concerns the way the theorization on the concept of public sphere has relied on a strict division between the public and the private, which contributes to the exclusion of women and their interests from
the public discussion. While this argument is important as such, it is my contention that more detailed analysis
of Young’s, Fraser’s, and Benhabib’s uses of public/private distinction is required in order to get a broader
understanding of the theorists’ feminist engagements with the concept of public sphere. The analysis that I am
proposing involves examining various context-related interpretations of public/private distinction and analyzing how the meaning of the concept of public sphere varies as it is opposed to distinct notions of the private
sphere in these theorists’ texts.
In my paper I argue, first, that Young, Fraser, and Benhabib offer feminist grounds for not only criticizing the
strict division between the public and the private, but also for defending the boundary between these two categories. Secondly, I argue that while these theorists have a lot in common in their feminist argumentation, there
are also differences between the theorists’ interpretations of the public/private distinction, and their operations
with the concept of public sphere within the public/private framework vary. With my presentation I hope to
give a glimpse of the diverse and even conflicting feminist argumentation involved in Young’s, Fraser’s, and
Benhabib’s discussions on the concept of public sphere and on the public/private distinction.
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Panel 4: Gender Variation/Transgender/Transsexual
Emmi Vähäpassi, University of Turku, Finland
Concepts for Gender Variation and the Issues of Transgression, Belonging and Inclusivity.
In this paper I ponder on the politics of concepts in research on gender variation as understood in the western
framework of transgender/transsexuality/trans/trans*. I ask, what does the selection of concepts mean for the
relationship of transgender studies and queer studies or gender studies more widely? This question is entangled with the medical history of transsexuality and the subcultural history of people who have identified with
the term transsexual, which they often found in stories of the mainstream media, such as the widely circulated
story of Christine Jorgensen. On the other hand, posing this question of the politics of concepts with regard
to gender variation already has a history of its own, in transgender studies and in transgender communities.
In her seminal text “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto”, Sandy Stone (1991) is proposing
a “post-transsexual” time. “Post-transsexual” in Stone’s essay denotes a move from medically sanctioned and
determined “transsexuality” to a politics and existence defined by transgender people.
In the academic scholarship, the question of concepts has been related to the establishing of a field of transgender/transsexual studies as separate from queer studies (Prosser 1998; Namaste 2000). Prosser and Namaste
are using the term transsexual to denote an experience or trajectory which in their view is incompatible with
queer. Prosser’s argument is that in transsexuality there is a desire for “not only reconciliation between sexed
materiality and gendered identification but also assimilation, belonging in the body and in the world” (Prosser
1998, 59) which in his view is directly contrary to the subversion that queer denotes.
I will also discuss the use of transgender and later trans* as umbrella terms and the tensions within these terms
and negotiations on inclusivity in transgender communities.
Jaye Cee Whitehead & Kathleen Bassett & Dmitriy Maslenitsyn, Pacific University, USA
Gender Performativity and Normative Power in the Trans-Clinical Encounter.
Sociologists and gender scholars have a firm foundation for conceptualizing the clinical encounter as a hierarchical power arrangement, as trans-body modification began as a medicalized gate-keeping practice. Yet, the
hierarchical structure of authority embedded in the process of gaining access to body modifications, hormone
therapy, and sex reassignment surgery embodies only part of the power mechanisms at work within the transclinical encounter. Drawing from 35 qualitative interviews with mental health professionals working with
transgendered clients in three American cities, we find practitioners who reject the pathology model of transgender clinical practice avoid “policing” client’s gender performances in traditionally oppressive ways; yet,
by using the language of feeling and the tools of emotion management, these mental health experts practice a
more subtle form of normative power premised on the assumption that healthy gender identities require consistency and congruence. Extending the work of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, we explore how normative gender power in this context pivots on distinguishing aspects of gender expression that are pliable, versus
others that are assumed presocial and fixed. We examine how this discursive framework lays the groundwork
for a form of normative power that presents itself as democratic and client centered, while at the same time
necessitating performative congruence.
Maria Debinska, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
The Work of Imagination. Transgender Political Activism in Poland
Recent election of an openly transsexual woman to Polish parliament is a good moment to stop and think
what can transgender activism bring into Polish feminist political imagination? Transgender activist employ
similar liberal political agenda and tactics as Polish feminists. They situate themselves vis-a-vis a “society”
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which needs to be transformed, thereby creating their own sociology, and perceive their imagined audiences
as the agents of an imagined change. Nonetheless, they bring a new quality into the Polish political discourse,
since their corporeality is brought to the center of attention and gender is their political message. Or rather
– doing gender, the constant work of exploring the possibilities of one’s body, forging relationships, making
sense of one’s biography and of the social world one was born into. Feminine essence narratives, narratives
of victimization and oppression and other stories that are often considered disempowering, radically change
their meaning as they enter the public discourse: combined with open gender variance they become parts of
an alternative political imaginary, because they ground the work of imagining a different world in individual
gendered bodies and biographies.
The purpose of this paper is to explore the notions of labour and imagination in the context of gender variance
and gender conformism and apply them to the empirical material collected during the ethnographic research
conducted among Polish transgender activists. Using David Graeber’s definition of immanent imagination and
his notion of oppression as lopsided structures of imagination, Jack Halberstam’s appreciation of failure and
Moira Gatens’ interpretation of Spinoza’s theorizing of imagination, I will analyze the two kinds of work: doing gender and political imagination, which in the case Polish transgender politics are one and the same thing.
Radhica Ganapathy, Theatre at Penn State University, USA
Performative Traditions of Survivalism
In response to the central focus of The 5th Christina Conference in Gender Studies, this research engages specific
performative traditions of survivalism as practiced by certain minority groups in India. The traditions examined,
as case studies, explore the marginal existence of two groups: 1. Hijras in Metropolitan cities (New Delhi and
Mumbai); and 2. Widows in Vrindavan. Hijras are transgender/transsexual individuals who live predominantly as
women in India. The name Hijra originates from the Urdu language and literally means “eunuch” or “hermaphrodite,” a name for an inter-sexed individual with both male and female sex chromosomes. Their economically
shallow existence is driven by social status and relationship to the dominant heterosexual community. Similarly,
widows living in the city of Vrindavan experience a poverty stricken existence due to their defining social status
of widowhood. Many of the women relocate to the religious site of Vrindavan in an effort to live a pious life, but
truth be told they have been abandoned by their family since losing their husband(s). Their place in the social
order is defined by patriarchal values, predominantly marriage and motherhood.
A mystic phenomenon, attributed to cultural practice and religious mythology, clouds the existence of both
groups. The word mystic alludes to the fact that there is ample room for inexplicable matters, occurrences,
and existences—a concept that India embraces, upholds, and practices. Are Hijras and widows cursed? Why
is their existence based in finding a way out of their curse via regeneration and reincarnation? While this
paper connects several key factors heavily defined by cultural understanding and practice between these two
very diverse groups, it specifically investigates the role of tradition, survivalism of such individuals, notions
of performativity, immediacy, and affect, and lastly, an understanding of site specific gendered existence(s).
Panel 5: Feminist Political Struggles
Hans Rollmann, York University, Canada
‘Reproductive Justice’ versus ‘Pro-Choice’: Conceptual Struggles with Political Consequences in the North
American Reproductive Rights Movement
Recent years have witnessed the term ‘reproductive justice’ emerge, challenge and in some ways supplant the
term ‘pro-choice’, which for the last half of the 20th century had been a dominant political label in the North
American reproductive rights movement. With origins in the United States, the phrase ‘reproductive justice’
has come to be associated with the notion that ‘pro-choice’ was largely a movement grounded in white middleclass feminism and ignored many of the realities and needs of racialized and poor women.
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The term has drifted north, and been in some ways uncritically adopted by Canadian reproductive rights activists and organizations. Yet there are complex dimensions to this semantic shift which are worthy of deeper and
more critical analysis.
On one level, the reproductive rights movement in Canada has a very different history from that in the United
States, and uncritical adoption of the American label threatens to obscure both the working class history of
reproductive rights struggles in Canada, as well as the very different legal and policy environment in which
they have developed.
On a deeper level, however, the shift from a language of ‘choice’ and ‘rights’ to one of ‘justice’ is one to be
concerned about. I argue that while it is rooted in an understandable desire to adopt a broader and more intersectional approach to reproductive rights struggles (and hence a desire to ‘re-brand’ the movement, especially
among youth activists) a paradigm rooted in ‘justice’ threatens to replicate some of the very same patriarchal
ideologies which have so confined and restricted women’s rights to choice and autonomy over reproductive
decision-making.
Anna Elomäki, University of Helsinki, Finland
Politics of ‘Gender’ at the Intersection of Feminist Theorizing, Advocacy, and Policy-Making
In this paper I discuss the politics of the concept ‘gender’ in recent EU-level discussions about gender equality. Many organizations that advocate for women’s rights still approach the concept ‘gender,’ which has
transformed academic feminist thinking, with suspicion. The idea of feminist politics based on the category
‘women’ for whom representation is sought, has still a strong position in the discourse of these organizations.
Policy-makers, in contrast, have adopted the concept ‘gender’ with more enthusiasm. European governments
and the European Union now promote ‘gender equality’ rather than ‘equality between women and men,’ or
‘advancement of women.’
Women’s organizations, such as the European Women’s Lobby, see the language of ‘gender equality’ as a risk
for the visibility and funding for specific women’s issues. The EWL has little will to allow new issues, such
as inequalities faced by men and discrimination and violence based on gender identity, be included in gender
equality policies. The rejection of the term ‘gender’ narrows down its policies and prevents them from creating
much-needed political coalitions.
However, the EWL’s criticism of the concept ‘gender’ is not fully ungrounded. In the use of EU policy-makers,
‘gender’ does not hold a similar political potential than in the academy. On the contrary, the shift to the language of ‘gender equality’ has effectively depolitized gender issues. A recent example of such a development
is the discussion on gender balance on corporate boards, where the neutral expression ‘gender imbalance’ has
replaced to more feminist concern with ‘women’s underrepresentation.’
The paper will also reflect on the difficulties that I have faced when analyzing the language used in policymaking. What is implied in my own choice of wording?
Franziska Martinsen, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany
Representation without ‘the Other’? A Feminist Critique of the Concept of Representation
According to recent feminist theorists, the current political situation of women in liberaldemocratic states is
to be assessed as ambivalent. On the one hand there is an increase of women taking part in both institutional
politics (parliament, government) and civil society (protest actions), on the other, due to the liberal separation
between public and private, achievements of representative politics are still undermined by “the other” of
public politics, e.g. social or/and gender inequalities. In my paper, I discuss an alternative concept of representation which claims to negotiate androcentric political structures: If representation is conceived as based
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on social participation (instead of a mere descriptive type of representation) there will be a better chance to
integrate those who are excluded by social or/and gender inequalities.
However, the feminist approach of “participative representation” provokes several objections. 1) It is to be
doubted whether “participative representation” itself can really avoid the problem of essentialization (as
though it is an original/exclusive task for women to bring social/reproductive items into focus (= deconstructive objection). 2) The concept of identity which is central for descriptive and substantial representation is
to be contested: Are representatives authorized to speak/ act for the excluded (= post-colonial objection)?
Referring to J. Rancière, I argue that a feminist vitalization of representative democracy is possible on two
conditions: 1) The opportunity for the concerned to “political subjectivization” on a nonrepresentationalist,
but participative basis. 2) Solidarity beyond identity between representatives and excluded.
Anne-Charlotte Husson, ENS de Lyon / University of Cambridge, France / UK
Feminist Thought and Online Lexical Creativity: the Case of ‘Mansplaining’
This paper will offer a case study of the term ‘mansplaining’ as a concept that brings together feminist scholarship and online practices, revealing conflicts in both these areas. ‘Mansplaining’, a recent neologism used
online, has not itself been theorised, but does owe a clear debt to feminist theory.
‘Mansplaining’ first appeared in 2008, and has no stable meaning. A popular online definition, however, describes it as [not] just the act of explaining while male [...]. Mansplaining is when a dude tells you, a woman,
how to do something you already know how to do, or how you are wrong about something you are actually
right about [...]. Bonus points if he is explaining how you are wrong about something being sexist!1
It is clear from this definition that ‘mansplaining’ relies on central but contentious feminist concepts such as
standpoint and privilege. It also draws on feminist linguistics and their description of gender roles in conversation. Despite such roots, ‘mansplaining’ itself is hardly present in feminist scholarship. It is, however,
extremely popular online as a way of naming gendered experience, both amongst feminists and more widely.
The term appeared, for example, during coverage of the 2012 US presidential campaign.
The spread of ‘mansplaining’ can be attributed both to its foundations in feminist scholarship and to the appeal of naming something already existent in a new and provocative way. However, because ‘mansplaining’ is
such a provocative term, it is also contentious, described by some as essentializing gendered behaviours. For
this reason, and because of its origins in an online environment, the conceptual validity of the term is open to
question. Of course, such questioning has larger consequences for contemporary feminist scholarship, in terms
of its relation to activism and its online manifestations.
1 Karen Healey’s LiveJournal, 8/05/2009. http://karenhealey.livejournal.com/781085.html.
Session 4
Panel 1: Concepts in Feminist Theory IV
Soili Petäjäniemi-Brown, University of Helsinki, Finland
The Concept of Act in Judith Butler’s Early Writings
Twenty-odd years after the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, the idea of doing or performing gender is part of the standard vocabulary of feminist theory, taught on introductory level gender studies courses.
This paper provides a philosophical peek behind the curtain of commonplaceness that covers ”doing gender”
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today. How did this “doing” become conceptually possible for Butler, what went into its making and how did it
take shape? Using Gender Trouble and the writings predating it as my source, I assess in particular the role of
existential phenomenology in the emergence of doing gender in the mid to late 1980s. While it has been suggested by commentators such as Moya Lloyd that there is a debt to the existential phenomenological tradition
and Beauvoir in particular, carried in the notions of becoming, style, and situation, I argue that the more fundamental term to follow in this respect is act. Whether prefixed with performative, bodily, or speech, the notion
of act is right at the center of Butler’s gender theory and theorizing. Beauvoir, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty all
had their own notions of act, and through revisiting Butler’s early writings on these thinkers I will follow her
negotiation with each. The investigation shows that rather than attesting to a significant debt, Butler works
away from what might be considered act, acting, or action in any strictly existential phenomenological sense,
attaching to the cracks in theories such as Sartre’s. In short, I seek to establish how act and acting came to
matter in the theorizing of gender: the work this term is employed to carry out, and the shifts that occur in its
meaning.
Adriano José Habed, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands
Bounded to Abjection? Slaves, Maidservants, and other Figures-in-Submission
Widespread understanding of abjection holds that the abject is what needs to be excluded (or better, foreclosed) from the subject in order for it to exist, and yet keeps threatening the subject with dissolution. Beyond
this definition, accounts of abjection differ significantly. According to some (e.g., Kristeva 1980) the abject
takes a psychic form, hence it is ultimately unsymbolizable and indescribable. For others (e.g., Butler 1993),
the abject takes both a psychic and a social form, hence it does have symbolic existence. These different
takes on abjection matter insofar as they imply different and often irreconcilable perspectives on mechanisms
of foreclosure, on the status of the Lacanian real, and on the way in which the abject returns to the subject.
Starting from the massive psychoanalytic and feminist production concerning abjection, I posit the following
questions: to what extent, and in which form, can the abject return to the subject? Which kind of menace does
it constitute? What is the abject’s space of agency? In order to develop these questions I take one particular
trope, namely, bondage. I consider bondage as a relationship among individuals that lingers between material
history and sexuality, hence as an exemplar way of negotiating social and psychic positions. Moreover, bondage is one of the privileged sites where the abject emerges as a figure-in-submission. By retracing feminist
interpretations of master-slave relationships such as Judith Butler’s (1997) reading of bondage in Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit and Anne McClintock’s (1995) reading of the Victorian maidservant, I will question
once again the status of abjection in feminist theory, as well as the notions related to it.
Johanna Sjöstedt, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Equality, Ethics, Existentialism: A Rereading of Simone de Beauvoir
The aim of my presentation is to elicit a reflection on the concept of equality from a philosophical historical
perspective through the prism of the French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir.1 The first part of my
paper will discuss the reception of Le deuxième sexe with respect to feminist readings of Beauvoir’s concept
of equality and in the second part I will present my analysis of her notion of equality and the reasons I think it
deserves further consideration in feminist theory.
1 My presentation is situated within the realm of philosophy and the history of ideas. For a good account of discussions
on equality in feminism more broadly speaking, see Christina Hughes, Key Concepts in Feminist
Theory and Research, London: Sage 2002.
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In the extant literature, Beauvoir is considered to be an ”equality” feminist, as opposed to proposing a feminism of ”difference”. In ”Humanism, gynocentrism and feminist politics” Iris Marion Young defined sexual
equality as ”bringing women and men under a common measure, judged by the same standards”, using Beauvoir as a prime example.2 In ”A personal note: Equal or Different” Luce Irigaray questioned Beauvoir’s notion
of equality: ”The demand to be equal presupposes a point of comparison. To whom or to what do women want
to be equalized? To men? […] To what standard? Why not to themselves?”3
Even if they differ when it comes to how they value Beauvoir’s work, both Young and Irigaray picture Beauvoir as a feminist of equality, where equality means to be measured by the same standard as men, also introducing the problem of how to determine this standard. Drawing on Beauvoir’s early essays on ethics, I
will argue that these interpretations are unsatisfactory because they fail to recognize that equality according
to Beauvoir is not a question of fixed standards, but rather a problem of and for ethics and/as critique where
equality should be considered in relation to the notion of reciprocity.4 In my view, this means that equality in
Beauvoir’s thought becomes an ethical framework for critique from which contemporary feminist scholarship
can benefit immensely.
Julia Honkasalo, The New School for Social Research / Helsinki University, USA / Finland
Natality as a Transformative Concept: Arendt as a Feminist Theorist
Scholars interested in the thought of Hannah Arendt have often criticized her for ignoring the question of
gender as a political problem. Despite the fact that she wrote on remarkable women, such as Rahel Varnhagen
and Rosa Luxemburg, none of Arendt’s writings deal specifically with gender and nowhere does she offer
a systematic account of the power dynamics of gender-based discrimination and oppression for instance.
Nevertheless, Arendt’s unique use of concepts such as action, plurality, solidarity, power and narration, have
provoked a rich discussion between various theorists regarding the use of Arendt to challenge, re-examine and
reformulate new directions for feminist theory and politics (eg. Honig 1995).
This paper focuses on natality as a transformative concept in feminist theorizing. I begin by showing how
already in the opening pages of The Human Condition, Arendt prepares the setting for her theorization of political action by making an analogy between birth and action. In this same context she also launches natality
as “the central category of political thought” (HC, 9). I will next present how this formulation has inspired
feminist philosophers such as Adriana Cavarero and Julia Kristeva to draw from Arendt in order to establish
a philosophy and politics based on maternality. “Birth”, “life”, “beginnings”, “finitude” and “contingency”
function in this context as concepts to challenge philosophy’s quest for eternal truths and immortality. Kristeva’s reading has further inspired authors such as Peg Birmingham to theorize natality as the ontological
foundation for human rights. Finally, I will put these readings in dialogue with Mario Feit’s unique reading
of Arendt as a critique of heteronormativity in order to illustrate how natality appears in the context of queer
theory. By doing this I show how one concept, in this case natality, can be used to formulate entirely different
projects for political emancipation.
2 Iris Marion Young, ”Humanism, Gynocentrism and Feminist Politics”, Women’s Studies Int. Forum, Vol. 8 (3)
1985:173-183, p. 174.
3 Luce Irigaray, Je, Tu Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin, Routledge: New York 1993, p. 12.
4 Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophical Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons et al. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois
Press 2004.
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Panel 2: Intersectionality IV
Dorottya Redai, Central European University, Hungary
Concepts of Race/Ethnicity, Whiteness, Performativity and Intersectionality in Analysing Ethnographic Material
Currently I am working on my phd dissertation, focusing on how race/ethnicity and class are constructed
through gender and sexuality in a school environment. I conducted fieldwork in a secondary vocational school
in Budapest, with students with working class background, and a significant percentage of Romany students.
Since I started constructing a theoretical framework for the analysis of my ethnographic material, I have encountered a number of conceptual issues to tackle. In this paper, I would like to discuss some of them, with the
aim to clarify them and work towards a coherent theoretical framework.
One of the issues is that of the concepts of race and ethnicity and how to refer to those students who identify
themselves as belonging to the Romani ethnic community. There are many arguments in the literature about
which concept to use in what kind of contexts, referring to what kind of social groups, and I find some approaches confusing. I would like to raise questions in this paper about my own choices about the usage of the
two concepts, in the hope of drawing up a consistent framework for reference.
Another issue emerging from the race/ethnicity conceptualisation debates is that of performativity. I argue in
my analysis that race/ethnicity is performative, like gender. Little has been written about the performativity
of race and ethnicity, therefore further elaboration is needed on the concept of performativity in this context,
which I will attempt in this paper. In the same vein, I am going to discuss the performativity of Whiteness.
I would also like to reflect on some practical challenges I am facing when doing intersectional analysis involving more than two analytical categories (class, race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality), and the particular challenges in grasping ‘class’ in attempting to use it as an analytical category. My fieldwork material consists of
transcripts of group and individual interviews with students, individual interviews with teachers, transcripts
of sex education classes and class observation fieldnotes. I will present examples from this material for the
illustration of my arguments in this paper.
Alena Minchenia, European Humanities University, Belarus
Eastern Europe as the European Other
This presentation aims to reflect on the concept of Eastern Europe in order to explicate the system of inequality
constructed through it.
The important insights and the language of critique derive from the ideas developed in postcolonial theory
(Coronil 1996, Chakrabarty 2000, Said 1978). The first line of these discussions looks at the politics of Western Europe itself in order to challenge orientalist discourses and the process of Othering oriented toward
Eastern Europe (Hudson 2000, Kuus 2004, Ousmanova 2007). The research shows that Eastern Europe is
constructed as “Europe’s internal East” (Kuus 2004: 476) through a number of strategies: the employment of
discursive oppositions such as passion and reason, backwardness and innovations, the power of traditions and
civic virtues; the symbolic construction of the region as only learning to be democratic; policing through the
politics of EU enlargement and financial support (Hudson 2000, Kuus 2004, Ousmanova 2007, Browning and
Joenniemi 2008).
At the same time this articulation of Otherness and backwardness is used by the pro-European elite, intellectuals and media in order to legitimize their own claim to be Europeans and/or to construct internal hierarchy
along the lines of ethnicity, religion, class, or location (Helms 2008, Ioffe 2008, 2007, Mishkova 2008, Borocz
2006). Importantly, feminist scholars have contributed to these discussions by pointing to the gendered structure of this imagination of the internal Other (Helms 2008).
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To explicate a gender dimension of the relationships between Europe and Eastern Europe I draw on the ideas
developed in feminist political geography (Lewis 2006, Sharp 2007, Zhurzhenko 2008: 215255). The researchers suggest that this is a woman who is seen as a threat for European identity, her mobility is blurring
the border between the EU and Eastern Europe (ibid: 220-223, see also Lewis 2006).
Karen Lynn Francis Houle, University of Guelph, Canada
Dismantling and Reactivating the Concept of Responsibility in order to Reengage and Respond to the Unaddressed Questions the Phenomenon of Abortion Asks
We lack a concept of responsibility adequate to the genuinely intractable complexity of one of unwanted
pregnancy. The field of thought on and about abortion currently consists of two entrenched positions and an
overarching sense (from within and without the feminist community) that everything has already been said
about it. In short: it is a binary polarized and affectively flat space. Note the massive contrast between the
quality of that conceptual space and the basic fact that unwanted pregnancy continues to happen everywhere
and to anyone, and thus continues to position us with a demand for resources – intellectual, emotional, material – with which to respond to its ubiquitous factiticy. By undertaking the philosophical labours of conceptual
analysis & retooling, we can engage directly with and reactivate this domain of thought. Conceptual analysis
is not a way of dodging ‘the moral issues’ or the ‘real feminist work.’ Engagement with the concept of responsibility with which we broach the issue of abortion, and retooling that very concept at its most basic level will
increase our capacity for (re)sponsiveness to the phenomenon of abortion, however we are positioned relative
to it, and in fact, increase our capacity to respond to other complex protracted difficulties we regularly face.
Enabling thought itself to be better responsive is thus an important component of the moral labour abortion
demands and a component of ethical labour more widely conceived. This paper demonstrates how the tools
with which we frame abortion can be better suited to the complex nature of that situation, and can thusly enable the becoming of a more complex collective of thinking selves in general.
Soili Haverinen, University of Helsinki, Finland
Gender and the Concept of God in Contemporary Theological Discourse
In my paper I will scrutinize recent models of understanding gender as a theological concept and interpretations of gendered religious language in the context of contemporary western Christian theology. I will focus
especially on the feminist argument about gender-exclusiveness of the Christian theological concepts and
examine the contributions of Elisabeth Johnson, Janet Martin Soskice and Gavin D’Costa on the theme.
My paper will be in close connection with the themes of my forthcoming dissertation in philosophy of religion
on the subject Contemporary Theologies of Gender. – A Critical Assessment.
Panel 3: Thinking Art III
Izabella Penier, University of Lodz, Poland
The Nation and Matrilineal Myths: Social Construction of Maternity in Michelle Cliff’s Novels
The aim of my paper is to show how the concept of matriliny can be used in the process of the feminist recovery of history on the example of the literary output of the postcolonial Caribbean writer Michelle Cliff. My
analysis of Cliff’s “Clare Savage novels”: Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven will elucidate the pitfalls of
using the concept of matriliny to create essentialized female Afro-Caribbean identities. My paper will particularly focus on how Cliff in vain tries to reconcile a typical for Afro-Caribbean female authors valorization of
matriliny with her deep ambivalence about motherhood, which in colonial and postcolonial times was implicated in various discourses inimical to the well-being of black women. Male-centered Caribbean nationalist
projects either used to picture black mothers as slave breeders or, conversely, as mothers of the newly-born
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nation. These projects burdened women with maintaining racial and cultural purity and marginalized them by
effacing their histories of resistance. Cliff’s novels strive to propose new feminist modes of political action
that empower women and to help them recover lost female histories, but this recovery is complicated and
eventually undermined by Cliff’s inability to come to terms with “degraded” identities of “impure” Caribbean
mothers whose bodies were the sites of colonial oppression and eradication of the idealized African culture.
Thus Cliff’s novels seem to rest upon an unresolved contradiction–the affirmation of matriliny and elision of
motherhood, which render all her efforts to make matriliny a site female empowerment futile. Thus my paper
will serve as a corrective to unabashedly celebratory readings of Cliff novels that picture their protagonist
Clare, who can be seen as Cliff’s alter-ego, as an exemplary figure.
Keywords: Caribbean female writing, matriliny, motherhood, radical feminism, Jamaica
Elsi Hyttinen, University of Turku, Finland
Figures on the Battlefield of Literature
In my postdoctoral project, I am examining the limits of proper desire in 1910s’ Finnish fiction: what I am
interested in is how producing the proper national subject, a subject for the emerging Finnish nation, almost
by definition meant regulating sexuality, as the concept of säädyllisyys, an approximate translation for which
would be chastity, was used to discuss both. In my research I focus on literary figures (Rodowick 2001, 1–4)
in order to make this symbolic battle visible.
When looking at literary characters as figures, I am primarily interested in the diffuse relationship of literature
to the historical moment of its writing: how literature takes material from the world outside it, including other
texts, reworks that discursive material and returns it to the reading public who then interpret their times partly
through those literary representations. Following Claudia Castañeda, the concept of literary figure is used in
this paper to signify the simultaneously material and semiotic effect of specific practices (Castañeda 2002, 3).
The concept of figure is popular but, I dare suggest, quite undertheorized in literary scholarship. There is a lot
of significant, groundbreaking research on different kinds of figures in literature (such as the new woman [see,
for example, Ledger 1997]), but quite often theoretical thinking about figurality is only implicit in these studies. In my paper, I will look into the rather sparse existing theoretical discussion on figurality and especially
figures as representations and reworkings of and models for human subjects in literature (see, for example,
Kuntsman 2009, De Lauretis 2007, Castañeda 2002) and bring forth a synthesis of that discussion, as well as
discuss the concept’s usability for historically oriented queer literary studies such as the research I am undertaking.
Castañeda, Claudia 2002: Figurations. Duke UP, Durham & London.
De Lauretis, Teresa 2007: Figures of Resistance. University of Illinois Press, Urbana & Chicago.
Kuntsman, Adi 2009: Figurations of Violence and Belonging. Peter Lang, Bern.
Rodowick, D. N. 2001: Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media. Duke UP, Durham & London.
Maarit Piipponen, University of Tampere, Finland
Empire or Genre? Imperial Intimacies and Generic Conventions in American Detective
Fiction
The paper generally examines how racial and imperialist politics have intersected with popular generic conventions in American literary history. In particular, the paper focuses on different conceptual approaches to
the study of classic detective fiction’s generic duo model, that is, a pair of detective partners and/or friends à
la Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. The paper firstly asks how this generic duo model is applicable to detective narratives featuring white American and Asian American partners, and secondly, what happens if this duo
35
model is approached also from the perspective of studies on imperial intimacy instead of studies on generic
conventions and traditions only.
As for textual examples, the paper compares two detective series: the male-oriented Charlie Chan series by
Earl Derr Biggers from the 1920s and the female-oriented Lily Wu series by Juanita Sheridan from the early
1950s. The comparison suggests that the generic duo model poses problems to detective fictions featuring female and/or ethnic detectives, because of matters relating to hierarchical systems of domination and the ideals
of equality and democracy.
Because the paper reflects upon the duo model and gendered interracial partnership/friendship not only through
generic conventions but also especially through empire studies, the paper’s theoretical framework emerges
from studies on colonialism and imperialism that have recently started to explore the various intimate histories
of different empires and nation-states (Stoler 2002 & 2006, Koshy 2004, Schueller 2007, Shah 2011).
Emily Jeremiah, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Strange Subjects: ‘Nomadism’ and Ethics in Contemporary Women’s Writing in German
This paper will discuss Rosi Braidotti’s notion of ‘nomadism’, focussing especially on its ethical implications.
It will demonstrate the significance of this concept for understandings of contemporary German (gender)
identities in particular. It will do so by means of readings of work by a number of German-speaking women
writers who live or have lived outside of the German-speaking countries. Writers to be discussed may include:
Birgit Vanderbeke, Dorothea Grünzweig, Antje Rávic Strubel, Anna Mitgutsch, and Barbara Honigmann.
These writers exemplify a ‘nomadic’ stance, one that takes account of a globalized, postmodern context but
that also insists on connectivity, relationality, ‘home’, and the material. The paper will expose the far-reaching
implications of a ‘nomadic’ view of subjectivity, showing its relevance for an understanding of key topics
in contemporary German studies (and beyond), namely: post-unification German identities, Jewish-German
subjectivities, green thought, questions of gender and sexuality, and globalization.
Panel 4: Bodies, Politics and Desires
Anna Schober, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany
Contemporary Architectures of the Body: (Popular) Arts and the Public Life of “Gender” Theory
Contemporary architectures of the body: (Popular) arts and the public life of “gender” theory
The central question of this research project concerns what corresponds to the current institutional success of
“gender” at the level of popular and artistic imagination. In order to grasp this level the project refers to visual
creations via which philosophical and sociological constructivist concepts of “gender” have been present in
the public realm in European countries since the 1980s. The investigation will encompass works both by artists (photography, painting or performance arts) but also productions in the realm of popular culture (films,
photographs, web pages, fanziness and posters).
The first goal of the project is to identify “clusters” ofimages that prevail in the public realm in relation to
interpretative models such as “gender”. The project thereby aims to verify the hypothesis – nourished by
preparatory research on the subject – that the following body-figurations seem to prevail: the singular body,
combining male and female attributes; representations of a “patchwork-self” composed of body parts that
usually do not belong to each other; emphatically staged bodytransformations; figurations that reject bodynorms; pronounced symmetrical male and female bodies and bodies involved in family life characterised by a
dissolution of “classical” models. The second goal of the project is to relate the visual material investigated to
transformations of social spaces populated by fears, tensions and desires – for instance in connection with new
(bio-) technologies, work-and life-worlds dominated by imperatives such as “flexibility” and “privatisation”
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or public spaces characterised by individualisation and an interiorisation of ambivalence and conflicts. The
originality of the project’s approach lies in the way it combines an analysis of how cultureoriented constructivist concepts travel through the public sphere with an analysis of processes of imagination and of the image as
an act in respect to bodily life practice.
Slađana Mitrović, University Maribor, Slovenia
Baubo – Transformation of Myth into a Concept
Small ancient terracotta statuettes named “Baubo” are representations of a woman’s genitals. The name is
so rich in associations that the philologists made Baubo into a goddess, a nurse, a slave and a demon of the
night. In The Homeric Hymn to Demeter she performs obscene gestures and obscene jokes in front of other
woman to give credit to Demeter’ release from mourning for her daughter. Mainly, Baubo has been linked to a
shocking spectacle –the lifting up a skirt and exposing to view what should remain hidden. Over the centuries,
the obscene language of Baubo remained transformed behind various frightening symbols as Medusa’s head.
After dark ages, 20th century revived the idea of explicit woman’s genitalia in visual representation. What interests us is how contemporary visual art creates obscene gesture of woman’s genitalia as a conceptual frame?
Is there any link between ancient myth and contemporary representation? Could myth become a concept?
We will stress some women artist from 1970 until now associated with iconography of female genitalia and
sexuality in visual art.
Justyna Szymanska, University of Warsaw/University of Copenhagen, Poland / Denmark
What Is ‘the New Feminism’?
What theory should be applied when dealing with a rather untypical feminist movement which members do
not even call themselves ‘feminists’?
FEMEN activists, radical ‘new feminists’, are famous around Europe for striving for women’s rights by corporally baring themselves. Their choice of weapons – their own naked bodies – ensures media coverage as
well as public attention, and has by far become their trademark so it would be fully excused to speak about
‘performance’, ‘theatralization’ and ‘spectacle’. But while they are feminists, or how they prefer to call themselves, ‘sextremists’, concepts of body and sexualisation, public and private are coming in handy. Many “classical” feminists point out that the group’s tactics reinforce the idea of women as sex objects whose only value
lies in their appearance, but FEMEN declares that when for centuries women’s bodies had been used by men,
the time has come for women to regain control over their sexuality, and that by using this form of protest they
become actors in the masculine system of dominance. Likewise, their weapon – their bodies – while obviously
very feminine, are also very masculine in terms of aggression and subjectivity. Yet established in Kiev and
with founding interposal of freeing Ukrainian women from patriarchate tyranny FEMEN cannot move away
from connotations with third-wave feminism and its (non)presence in so called ‘Second World’.
However, it seems that it is not the core that differs. As FEMEN activist once said, “classical feminism is like
an old sick lady that doesn’t work anymore. It’s stuck in the world of conferences and books. We have the
same ideas as the classical feminists, what is different is the form of fight. We fight in a way that will attract
young women to the ideology again”. Hence, what are applicable concepts to describe the ferment of postpostmodernism in feminism?
Shoba Venkatesh Ghosh, University of Mumbai, India
“Economies of Desire” as a Conceptual Framework
My research into unofficial cultures of sexuality in India has focused on the curious and quite unprecedented
phenomenon of the South Indian “sex-film star”, Shakeela, who seemed for a while to pose a very real threat
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to the hegemony of the male megastars of the Malayalam mainstream cinema, even driving their careers into
crisis in the early 2000s. Though not the first she is inarguably the most successful of a long line of female sexfilm stars in the south, giving the Malayalam film industry, many argue, its first real female superstar. As such
Shakeela offers us an aperture into „new economies of desire.. that have emerged in India since the 1990s, and
the vernacular claims to cultural modernities in a period of economic liberalisation and India..s insertion into
the global economy. As the theorists Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam (Power and Contestation: India since
1989, New York, Zed Books, 2007) argue, the „new economies of desire include the explosion of a series of
new aspirations.. (83). Further, „the new economy was not simply about consumption; it was equally about
desire, pleasure, and production at a dispersed and molecular level.. (86). Using this conceptual scaffolding
– new economies of desire – I analyze the „Shakeela film.. as signalling a cinematic trend, a restructuring of
industry economics, a reconfiguring of the demographics of viewership, a point of slippage between fringe
and mainstream, a set of representational codes, a locus of desire, and a newly consolidated (and largely unauthorised) domain that can be productively analysed for its dynamics of producing, naming and distributing the
subject of “sex”.. in non-hegemonic, even subaltern, cultural locations. Fundamentally, the question I address
is, how is this figure – at once the screen object of masculinist fantasies and a threat to the sexist structure of
the industry – to be read in feminist terms, and what are the new economies of desire that she is produced by
and that she in turn mobilises?
Panel 5: Thinking Violence
Ferya Tas, King’s College London, UK
When Women Commit Honour Based Violence
Honour based violence (HBV) has been committed across the world for many years. Although men are the
prominent perpetrators of HBV, women also commit this crime. Conceptualizing HBV is, however, crucial to
make a difference between when men and women commit HBV.
The concept of honour that triggers HBV is always linked to women’s gender roles, their sexual experiences,
and their sexual activities. Therefore in order to protect men’s honour, women should be obedient and suppressed. They should behave in chaste and not engage with any sexual activities outside wedlock.
HBV in that sense is usually committed either to protect or restore the family honour. Male perpetrators of
HBV protect their masculinity by showing the fact that they ‘control’ women within their families. However,
if protecting male relatives’ honour and masculine power are the triggers of HBV, why women also commit
this crime?
The paper aims to analyze the reason why women commit HBV from a feminist perspective. It will show
how women feel pressure from the masculine power and social code of honour even when they commit HBV.
Therefore, the paper begins with conceptualizing honour and HBV as well as motives of HBV. Following this,
the paper will analyze three HBV cases committed by women in Turkey in order to show the patriarchal power
that forces women to commit those crimes. The common ground of those cases is that they all are committed
in the name of so-called social code of honour. In the first case a 26-year-old women killed her rapist. In the
second case a 47-year-old mother killed her 22-year-old single daughter for having sexual relationship with a
married man. In the last case, a 26-year-old woman killed her newborn baby whom she had delivered out of
wedlock.
Melissa Mosko, Canisius College, USA
The Politics of Sexual Violence
My presentation will explore the political assumptions latent in the concept of ‘sexual violence,’ within the
liberal framework. Even where attention is paid to the nature of violence, there is little agreement about what
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constitutes an act of violence or what conditions constitute violence being done. Compounding this in the
present context is the addition of politically charged debates about sex, sexuality and sexual expression.
For example, in the United States and other liberal democracies, the political neutrality of sex acts is presumed, and sex acts become violent when physical force or psychological manipulation is present, such as in
the case of forcible or statutory rape. An approach like this is dangerous, I contend, because it misses the way
in which any individual’s sexual identity and sexual expression is already politically informed by systems of
patriarchy and heteronormativity. Thus, coercion and manipulation may be present in the very way one conceives of one’s sexuality and the ways in which they express that sexuality.
This way of thinking is symptomatic of an atomistic understanding of violence as a particular quality of relation between individuals, while ignoring the systematic production of particular patterns behavior. Analyzing
the political underpinnings of the concept of sexual violence encourages us to consider the ways that violence
is part of larger systems of oppression and domination, as a way in which otherwise invisible systems of oppression are manifested in people’s lives, and also as a way oppressive systems are maintained over time.
Thinking about particular practices of sexual violence in their relation to oppression more generally will, I
believe, bring the philosophical concepts used to theorize above violence in line with the way that persons
experience violence, in order, ultimately, to yield liberatory philosophical and political practices.
Stephanie Miedema, Partners for Prevention, Thailand
Conceptual Choices for Research on Female Masculinities and Intimate Partner Violence in Bangkok
The proposed paper discusses how the author navigates conceptual choices of research on female masculinities
and gender-based violence - with a focus on intimate partner violence – within communities of Thai toms1.
The paper will assess the politics of four interrelated conceptual areas: (1) Pluralities of female masculinities
within the context of Thai tom communities, and particularly the relationships between broader socio-political
discourses of masculinities in Thailand, and individual gender performances. (2) Existing (heterosexual-oriented) frameworks of intimate partner violence and their relevance to exploring patterns of violence within and
around the same-sex relationships of toms and their lovers. In particular, this section will discuss the conceptual limitations of gender-power theories of partner violence in the context of Thai tom masculinities, and the
intersectionalities between partner violence with structural violence against toms. (3) Associations between
masculinities and violent practices, and how de-linking masculinities from men offers alternative ways to look
at how those associations do or do not manifest among Thai toms and why. This inquiry subsequently provides a way to avoid simplistic comparisons between female and heteronormative masculinities (Halberstam
1998), and same-sex and heteronormative patterns of partner violence. (4) Challenging the one-dimensional
discourses on violence prevention that understand masculinity – and the connections between masculinities
and violence – as a male project, and expanding this concept to include alternative spaces of masculinities,
in order to more fully map how, when and why these masculinities are associated with partner violence, and
also associated in some spaces with non-violence. 1 ‘Tom’ – derived from ‘tomboy’ – is a linguistic category
of identity used by, and to describe, transgender FTM populations in Thailand. The critical element of ‘tom’
identity is self-assumed masculinity, which includes sexual attraction to women (Sinnott 2004).
Deborah Western, Monash University, Australia
Violence Against Women: In What Ways Does the Concept of a Gender-Based Understanding of Violence
Enhance or Diminish the Development of Prevention of Violence Against Women Programs?
Traditionally the field of violence against women (initially domestic violence) has been the provenance of
women and feminist theories and practice. The power of feminist theories to introduce and activate concepts
such as the personal is political and to name acts such as rape in marriage as criminal and intolerable contributed to change in the lives of countless women. Feminist practice holds that victim/survivors must be believed,
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their rights to make choices and decisions strengthened and upheld, and responsibility and accountability for
violence to be taken by the perpetrator of the violence. With more recent increased social awareness of violence against women has come the understanding that responsibility for reducing and preventing this violence
is a community responsibility. At the same time a different conceptualisation of violence against women appears to be emerging; that of ‘gender-based violence’. This paper explores the implications of the use of this
concept in the areas of community awareness and policy development in relation to violence against women in
the state of Victoria, Australia. Does the concept of gender-based violence enable a more comprehensive consideration of what constitutes violence against women and methods of violence prevention? Does it provide
a space for a more fully theorised understanding of violence against women by taking into account multiple
feminist and gendered perspectives and experiences? Or does it, paradoxically, contribute to a de-gendered
policy response to violence against women through an unquestioning appropriation of current widespread
terminology? What role might the concept of gender-based violence play in the emerging field of prevention
of violence against women, particularly in organisations not historically involved in providing feminist or
gendered practice or policy responses?
Saturday 25 May
Session 5
Panel 1: Sexology and Statistics
Kirsten Leng, Northwestern University, USA
Permutations of the Third Sex: Sexology, Subjectivity, and Anti-Maternalist Feminism at the Turn of the
Twentieth Century
What is ‘Woman’? What could—indeed should—She become? Such questions preoccupied an array of social actors during the nineteenth and early twentieth century as part of the so-called “Woman Question.” By
the turn of the twentieth century, the fledgling field of sexology emerged as an important intellectual resource
for the Woman Question’s interlocutors, particularly in Germany, the intellectual homeland of the burgeoning
scientia sexualis.
Within anti-feminist arguments, sexological evidence was used to promote and defend an ideal of womanhood
defined by women’s maternal capacities and associated qualities of love, care, and selflessness. Anti-feminists
further used sexology to claim that women who transgressed this ideal of womanhood—namely, feminists—
were “unnatural,” and to conflate feminists with another disruptive sexual subject: the female homosexual.
This diagnosis in turn enabled anti-feminists to assert that feminists only represented the demands of a small
cadre of “abnormal” women.
While much can be said about the chimeral quality of anti-feminists’ portraits of feminists, in reality, and
particularly in Germany, most early twentieth century feminists embraced a maternal definition of womanhood, and used it to ground a variety of political claims. Indeed, these “maternalist” feminists insisted that the
physical potential to become mothers endowed women with particular spiritual qualities, specifically those of
altruism, love and care, which women could contribute to political and social life. These feminists were also
eager to distance themselves from imputations of sexual abnormality—especially given that many leading
feminists lived in long-term same-sex partnerships.
Yet not all feminists embraced an understanding of womanhood defined by heterosexual maternity, or shied
away from associations with homosexuality. In fact, within Germany and Austria some dissident feminists
actually seized upon the conflation of feminism and homosexuality as an opportunity to rethink female subjectivity, and used sexology to espouse alternatives. In this paper, I explore these feminists’ articulations of
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alternative models of non-maternal, non-heterosexual womanhood and the role sexology played therein. My
analysis focuses on texts written by three German-speaking feminists—Anna Rüling, Johanna Elberskirchen,
and Rosa Mayreder—and analyzes the ways they used sexology to advance markedly different models of
subjectivity that broke with the expectations of reproductive heterosexual womanhood. I maintain that these
texts should be seen as contributions to the ongoing Woman Question regarding sexual subjectivity and social
order—contributions that rebuked exclusively maternal representations of womanhood and allowed space for
the possibility of diverse gender identifications and non-heterosexual desires. And yet, these subjective alternatives were problematic in their own ways: in fact, they tended to reaffirm anti-feminist claims that feminism
only represented the needs of an “abnormal” minority, and that most women were essentially, and apolitically,
maternal. Furthermore, these authors frequently drew upon the eugenic valences of fin-de-siècle sexology,
thereby significantly circumscribing the potential of their subjects.
Revisiting these neglected heterodox voices is important for feminist scholarship for a number of reasons.
First, it provides insight into two critical sites of intractable conflict within early twentieth century feminism:
namely, sexuality and subjectivity. Second, grappling with these alternative visions points up the fact that
what it meant to be a Woman at this time was by no means a settled question, especially among feminists.
Finally, it reveals that feminist conflicts over sexuality and identity have a long history.
Jemima Repo, University of Helsinki, Finland
The Biopolitical Origins of Gender Theory
This paper asks the question of how gender became tied to the biopolitical apparatus of sex. In feminist theory,
the association of gender with sex is often taken for granted, in the sense that gender has been the cultural
nominator of sex for no more than a half a century. Prior to this, gender, originating from the Old French
gendre and traceable to the Greek genos, referred to any kind or sort of any type of phenomenon. Yet, few in
the English-speaking world associate the word with anything other than the sexual order of things. How this
association came to be made, through what reconfigurations of power/knowledge, remains to be answered.
Michel Foucault’s genealogy of sexuality traces the emergence of the modern biopolitical sexual apparatus.
His analysis, however, only addresses the Victorian era, whereby any later changes in the apparatus are beyond
the scope of the genealogy. This includes the emergence of gender in the mid-nineteenth century. The origins
of the gender term are commonly located in second wave feminist theory. In the paper I show that although
second wave feminists may have popularised its usage, the term was first used by sexologists studying intersexuality and transsexuality in the 1950s. Gender was therefore introduced into the sexual order through a
highly psychologised and medicalised – and hence, biopoliticised – field of knowledge. Later, in the 1980s, it
was taken up by demographers to explain declining fertility in the West, thus effecting the biopolitical deployment of gender. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implication of such an analysis for the future
use of the gender term in feminist theory.
Kristi Winters, GESIS Leibniz Institutes for the Social Sciences, Germany
What Does It Mean if ‘Gender’ Is Statistically Significant? Why We Can’t Interpret Our Results Using the
Measures ‘Man/Woman’.
Quantitative social researchers must explicitly connect three components, concept, causality, and theory, for
hypothesis testing. In this paper I focus on the definitional and conceptual aspects of the ‘gender gap’; a term
often used with little theoretical consideration. I explain the complications associated with the terms ‘sex’,
and ‘gender’ by evaluating their properties as concepts and then advance the following arguments: 1) statistical analyses that categorise participants as male or female produce results that are conceptually unclear and
therefore empirically imprecise; 2) the causal mechanisms at work when the sex/gender variable is statistically
significant are unclear and under-theorised; and 3) my exploratory empirical research indicates the inclusion
of gendered attitudes and a sex variable has complex effects on the statistical significance of the sex variable. I
41
propose a solution to our conceptual problems by recommending a careful application of the word ‘gendered’
for use in statistical analyses and demonstrate that the inclusion of gendered attitudes measures are important
to gain a better understanding from where sex- and gender-based variation comes. I propose a different answer
to the question first investigated by Pippa Norris, who found no evidence for an ideological ‘gender gap’ in
Britain: my analysis shows such a gap does exist. There is a gendered gap when such measures are included,
but there is not a systematic ideological sex gap in British men’s and women’s political attitudes.
Antu Sorainen, University of Helsinki, Finland & Alisa Zhabenko, The European University at St Petersburg,
Russia
Queer Kinship in Figures: State Statistics and the Politics of Visibility
The paper discusses the methodology of a research on the statistical visibility of queer families. We will argue
that the state statistics do not follow the process of queering families and care relationships in the wider society. The legalization of same-sex partnerships has made same-sex couples visible in statistics but these figures
do not recognize complicated kinship relationships or queer immigration that often surrounds same-sex families. This may pose problems for the social, political and legal invisibility for some intimate relations as state
statistics are crucial for political representation and as a basis for claiming rights for social groups.
Looking at the case of Finland, we will discuss the statistics on same-sex registered couples, including samesex families with children and same-sex couples with one or more family member having moved to Finland
from other country from inside or outside of the EU. Finland sets an interesting case for its unique geo-political
location: it is an EU member state on the border of ‘East’ and ‘West’; it represents the same liberal principles
for equality of same-sex families that are commonly shared by other European countries; and its state statistics
data can be recognized as more or less representative for the other EU member states. In 2002, the possibility
for registered partnership was opened in Finland. The country also started to recognize same-sex marriages
and partnerships that were legalized in other countries. In 2009, Finland officially allowed internal adoption
in the same-sex families. Official statistic in Finland show that about 500 couples per year entered registered
partnerships since 2002, compared to about 20 000 marriages.
Finnish state statistics count registered partnerships and marriages separately, as well as children growing in
same-sex or heterosexual families. At the end of 2010, there were 267 same-sex registered partnerships in
which children under 18 year were raised – it forms an astonishing 0,0% of the whole number of families with
children in Finland, and only 3 male couples are included in the whole amount. Queer families and relationships seem to be too complicated or too marginal to be counted separately in the state statistics. On the one
hand, sometimes they are counted as heterosexual marriages (as in the case of transgender fathers), and on the
other hand, sometimes they are not counted at all (as is the case of social fathers of rainbow families). In this
regard, statistics makes the visibility of queer families problematical. Because they are not visible in official
statistics of Finland, some queer families and some members of ‘queer care units’ become invisible for the
social service and state support system as a social group.
Part of registered partnerships in Finland consists of immigrant citizens of other countries who have moved
to Finland on the basis of family ties: not only citizens from other liberal EU countries but also from the
neighboring countries where same-sex families are either not recognized legally (Russia) or not culturally
visible (Estonia). These queer immigrants might have rights for family status and parenting in Finland, but on
the territory of their native countries their civil status is sometimes either not legally recognized n/or socially
understood. The rejection of some countries to legalize same-sex families can create cultural and bureaucratic
cages for native citizens of these countries. Even inside the EU, different countries have their own history of
legislation on same-sex families and parenthood and the system of state statistics often creates not only invisibility – for example, the UK National statistics do not include any same-sex couples who register their relationships overseas – but also methodological problems for the research on the increasingly important social
phenomenon of queer immigration.
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Panel 2: Narratives and Writing
Kristen Cree Brill, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Intersections with the Past: The Legacy of Slavery in the American Second Wave Feminist Movement
As a genre, women’s neo-slave narratives emerged in the later twentieth century coinciding with the second
wave feminist movement. Perhaps most associated with Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved (1987), the genre’s depiction of the horrors of antebellum slavery, frequently intermingled with the
conditions of contemporary society, provided a new lens to examine the darkest chapter in American history.
However, the genre offered more than historical reflection, it posed a new way in which to critique the racial
homogeneity and white privilege of the current second wave feminist movement. Focusing on Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), this paper will explore how women protagonists
in neo-slave narratives comment on gendered inequalities in modern society and racial inequalities in the
feminist movement through dialogue with other women characters in the novel. In this way, the dialogues
within the novels will be examined as oral histories: deconstructing the power dynamics as well as the explicit and implicit disseminated messages between the speaker and listener. It is through women’s dialogues
that the harshest condemnations of the perpetuation of racial oppression from the nineteenth-century to the
present day are delivered. As such, these dialogues merit a closer scrutiny as oral histories. Considering neoslave narratives in the greater lexicon of oral histories provides a new methodological framework to analyze
this rich source material, facilitating the development of new interpretations and perspectives of the genre and
its commentary on gendered and racial forms of oppression in both the second wave feminist movement and
wider contemporary society.
Gianmaria Colpani, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Figuration and the Making of Feminist Critical History
This paper reflects around the concept and practice of figuration in relation to the making of feminist history. Figuration has been proposed and developed as a theoretical practice (a quasi-methodology) by Donna
Haraway (2004). Figuration works by mobilizing particular figures in order to engage with the present both
critically and affirmatively. Therefore, as Haraway herself has suggested (see Haraway 1992), the choice of
a given figure in the practice of figuration depends on the figure’s capacity to question dominant narratives
received from the past and set the stage for alternative futures. Despite this centrality of temporality to the
practice of figuration, however, the latter has been hardly ever put in relation to history and, most important,
to the making of feminist critical history. This is partly due to the fact that Haraway has mainly engaged in
her own work with non-human and/or post-human figures, while the subject of history (her-story included)
is assumed to be human, if not humanist, per inition. Against this background, this paper fosters a productive encounter between figuration and feminist critical history. In order to do so, it looks at the few historical
figures that have appeared as figurations in the writings of Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti (see Sojourner
Truth in Haraway 1992 and Ursula Hirschmann in Braidotti 2001). The readings of these figures as figurations
provided by Haraway and Braidotti are confronted with the works of Joan Scott (2011) and Gayatri Spivak
(1999) on critical history. The goal is that of highlighting which frictions and new insights may be generated
by an encounter between figuration and feminist critical history: What can figuration tell us about the subject
of feminist history? And what can feminist history tell us, in turn, about the nature of the figure in figuration?
Bibliography
Braidotti, Rosi, ‘Gender, Identity and Multiculturalism in Europe,’ (The First Ursula Hirschmann Annual Lecture on Gender and Europe), European University Institute, Florence, Italy, 8 May 2001.
Haraway, Donna, ‘Ecce Homo, Ain’t (Ar’n’t) I a Woman, and Innapropriate/d Others: The Human in a PostHumanist Landscape,’ in J. Butler and J. Scott (eds.), Feminists Theorize the Political, New York:
Routledge, 1992, pp. 86-100.
——, The Haraway Reader, New York: Routledge, 2004.
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Scott, Joan W., The Fantasy of Feminist History, Durham London: Duke University Press, 2011.
Spivak, Gayatri C., ‘History,’ in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 198-311.
Irina Ioana Bocianu, “Dimitrie Cantemir” Christian University, Romania
The Enigma of New Eve
This study is an examination of the way Angela Carter’s writing techniques and themes made her an important
analyst of the body modifications which help build one’s gender, personality, and power. Angela Carter, postmodern feminist writer, is known for her magic realism novels concerning women and their breakthrough in
a male dominant world. Trapped herself in a difficult battle with anorexia, Angela Carter focused her writing
on the image of the female body, a monstrous, deformed, abject body with the help of intertextuality, metalanguage, magic realism, masquerade, picaresque and feminism. Themes such as body image, gender, patriarchy,
transgender and transsexuality are central in her works and a comprehensive analysis of her novel The Passion
of New Eve (1977) should necessarily focus and rely on them. Even if transgender and transsexuality were
somehow rejected by second wave feminists, third wave feminists were more tolerant towards these terms
and themes. Based on Judith Butler’s performativity and agency which shape one’s gender as a social construct as well as Jack Halberstam’s the queer plus masculine femininity and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis
of the mirror stage combined with the analysis of metafiction, the dialogic nature of the novel, play on words,
name symbolism, and the gaze, the present study shows how all these concepts go hand in hand in an attempt
to show how bodies are the roots of one’s gender formation, personality and adaptation to a male dominant
society where terms like gender, transgender, transsexuality, cross dressing are more present and topical than
ever. At the same time, this analysis is an essay to understand what it means to be the Other, the opposite sex,
when in her/his shoes.
Panel 3: Queer Pasts and Futures
Luce De Lire, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany
“This Time, We Have Gone Too Far” – “Queer Futurity” from a Deconstructive Perspective.
During the last decade, the debate on “queer futurities” has moved many minds and produced a considerable
output, theoretically as well practically. Edelman, Munoz, Halberstam and ??? are the names to be recalled
here. But there are many more. In the first part of my talk I will quickly map different variants of queer futurity” on the basis of different notion of “negativity” or “failure”. From this point on, I am going to take on a
deconstructive stance:
My first hypothesis to be proven will be that all “queer futurities” must fall back on a hope for “positive future”,
for something productive “to come” out of the strategies of negativity, thereby formally subsuming again to
the heteronormative logic of childcare and reproduction. Halberstams proposal of “cutting” is probably the
most radical of these approaches, but still – Furthermore, I shall argue that this is not due to theoretical inconsequence on the site of the “queer futurists”. Rather, this has to do with the paradoxically regressive structure
of “negativity” itself, which I will try to sketch out with the help of french philosopher Jacques Derrida.
My second hypothesis to be proven will be that Bini Adamczak is right in claiming that “failure” is the individualized version of a pre-1990 concept of “defeat”. This is to say: Many (not all) “queer futurists” tend to
dangerously exclude the neoliberal strategy of “atomization”, causing loneliness and alienation, from their
theoretical scopes. This results, I shall claim, from a notion of “selfreflexive subjectivity” which must be radically collectivized.
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I will end on a proposal of “futurity” happening within the finite “now”, drawing on Avital Ronell’s notion
“[T]his time, we have gone too far”.1
Jacek Kornak, University of Helsinki, Finland
Queer as a Political Concept
In my paper I analyse the emergence of ‘queer’ as a political concept at the end of the 1980s. From abusive
and stigmatising term for homosexuals ‘queer’ became a political term that was very successful in mobilising
many activists and academics around specific aims and actions.
I claim that facing AIDS traditional identity concepts were not sufficient in expressing the experience of
people with this illness but also of their close ones, allies and finally many others who decided to show their
disagreement to the political, social and cultural reaction in the US towards the problem of AIDS. Soon ‘queer’
became the term that not only gave more space to articulate the struggle of AIDS activists but it became much
broader term that was used in many activists and academic discussions on identity, community and forms of
embodied knowledges. My question is what kind of sign ‘queer’ became that it was so important during that
time and it is still for many in discussing the experience and the politics of sexual minorities?
Danielle Cooper & Ela Przybylo, York University, Canada
Cross-Pollinations: Archiving Asexually
The archive has emerged as a compelling metaphorical device within many fields of study including queer
and feminist theorizing (i.e., Cvetkovich 2003, Burton 2003, Love 2007, Halberstam 2005 & 2011), being
mobilized towards alternative projects of historiography, history making and unmaking, and affect navigation.
Indeed, metaphorical archiving has become a tool in the feminist and queer tool belt; a handy political strategy
for telling untold stories and telling them in ways that contest typical narrative structures. Asexuality, on the
other hand, persists as a neglected onceptual framework, and is routinely configured as prudish, irrelevant,
or nonexistent within queer and feminist writing and theorizing. In this sense, asexuality is both a foundling” concept, in that it is ongoingly abandoned, and a “shadow” concept, in that it unnoticed but present,
“haunt[ing] the more acceptable forms of feminism” (Halberstam 2011).
In this paper, we put the archive in touch with asexuality. These two concepts, we demonstrate, benefit from
cross-pollination. First, the archive, metaphorically and queerly understood, allows for a creative telling of
asexual pasts and presents, allowing for a more expansive and queer figuring of asexuality. Second, asexuality manipulates the terms of the archive, asking what counts as erotic ephemera – re-qualifying what is “archivable.” Archiving asexually, thus allows for a new archiving method to take shape, one that is specifically
attuned to asexual resonances. Our paper demonstrates that asexuality, while a foundling and shadow concept,
is not only worth feminist and queer attention, but can also push the parameters of the archive, of story telling,
and of acceptable modes of political thought and action.
1 Avital Ronell, Finitude’s Score, University of Nebraska Press, p.1994
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Błażej Warkocki, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
Male Homosocial Desire: Significance, Capabilities, Future
In my paper, I would like to introduce the concept of „male hmosocial desire” - as a bit underrated on the map
of concepts within (not only Polish) gender and queer studies.
Firstly, I would like to examine carefully the concept of homosocial desire (and others like eg. homosesual
panic) in the works of creator of the concept - Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: especially Between Men. English
Literature and Male Homosocial Desire and Epistemology of the Closet. I want to introduce analitical and
political potential inherent in this term (which main conclusions come from the analysis of canonical Western
literature). I want to show the complications of the idea and conflicts especially with psychoanalysis. I will
examine the relations with Marxist thought and the evolution of the concept in the later works of Sedgwick espacially the connection between homosocial desire and theory of affects.
The basic context is, of course, English literature. But in my speech, I would like to show some sort of underestimation of the term (and its analytic power) in the Polish gender studies and its politics. I will also examine
the power of subversion of the concept within literary studies when they are based on the idea of „nation”.
Panel 4: Gender and Sexuality in Translation
Anna Temkina, European University at St. Petersburg, Russia
‘Gender’ as a Challenge in Russia
Up until now the status of Gender Studies has remained marginal within Russian academy. The current stage
of development of gender studies is taking place in the context of globalization. In this context researchers
become interested in the way gender as a category, having crossed borders, is produced in different localities
Twenty years have passed since gender approach was first identified in Russia. Gender studies and feminist
researchers and activists have discussed whether it is appropriate to use the term “gender” in the Russian context. The term “gender” has become an umbrella for different, sometimes contradictory scholar approaches,
dedicated to a social-cultural definition of sexual differences. Some scholars argue that the category “gender”
is often denied its critical potential and “revolutionizing spirit”. Critiques claim that ‘Western’ feminist theories and gender approach are not relevant for the Russian context.
Over the last year, the gender agenda has been assuming a new shape. The term “gender” has entered political discourse as religious and moral threat with a sharp negative connotation, as a symbol of foreignness and
the West. This was manifest during the Duma discussion of the Law on Gender Equality. Gender equality
has become a political issue because the forces which regard it as a moral threat have turned it into a political
issue. In 2012 Pussy Riot -- a feminist, punk-rock collective that stages politically provocative impromptu
performances in Moscow - entered the political scene and highlighted a cluster of oppositions - the secular
versus the religious, tradition versus the postmodern and feminism. The law banning publicity that promotes
homosexuality and pedophilia was also approved in 2012.
In this way sexuality, equality, reproduction politically represented as gender threats to spirituality and Russian particularities. “Gender” is formulated as a western Other. An “anti-gender” politics is slowly but surely
being formulated in which declining of spirituality, family and gender roles instability, homosexuality and
minority rights are all blamed on “gender,” threaten and insidious concept
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Yolanda G. Ealdama, University of the Philippines, Philippines
Deconstructing “GENDER” in Gender Mainstreaming in the Philippines
“Gender mainstreaming” in the Philippine bureaucracy has been institutionalized in the state’s annual budget,
with the insertion of the phrase “5 % of the budget of all national agencies, local government units and state
colleges and universities should be used for gender and development programs.” The word “gender mainstreaming” has been touted by the Philippine Commission on Women as its main strategy for pursuing equity
and equality. A closer analysis of the documents where “gender mainstreaming” is used reveals that “gender”
refers to “male and female.” The construction of gender in a dualistic term is reinforced when in several forms
which require identification of persons change the category “sex” into “gender” having in mind the same dualistic perspective. Several authors however, argue that “gender” as a noun is diverse and “gender” as a verb
is dynamic. This paper, therefore, seeks to examine the construction of “gender” in “gender mainstreaming”
in the Philippine bureaucracy.
Alicia Izharuddin, School of Oriental and African Studies, UK
The Viability of Acculturating Travelling Concepts of Gender and Sexuality in Multilingual Malaysia
In a multilinguistic country such as Malaysia, feminist academics and activists grapple with communicating
gender and sexuality rights-related discourse in a public sphere where transnational feminist concepts exist
in local languages simply as loaned signifiers. This paper considers the cultural-linguistic economy of transnational feminist concepts of ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ in a multicultural, multilinguistic context of Malaysia
where such transnational concepts are viewed with moral disdain outside the discourse of Malaysian academia
and activism. It discusses the theoretical challenges of travelling theories that arrive either replete with globalised Anglo feminist baggage or empty of conceptual roots in public discourse. Nonetheless, the choice to
employ travelling theories is a powerful one for the membership and articulation in a transnational feminist
activist community in which the discursive impulses of Anglo feminist academia dominates. The banning of
the country’s only LGBT rights festival, Seksualiti Merdeka, in 2011 precipitated the circulation of false descriptions and connotations of the festival in the Malaysian media as an event promoting ‘free sex’ or casual
sex. With ‘merdeka’ to mean ‘independence’ or ‘liberation’ but with ‘seksualiti’ (sexuality) not gaining much
linguistic and discursive traction in local languages, the very name of the festival became subject to misunderstanding and smear campaigns. In neibouring Thailand and Indonesia, the piecing together of a narrative past
of non-normative genders and sexualities forms a strategy to inject cultural and moral legitimacy to presentday globalised hybrid concepts of ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’. This paper then considers the viability of constructing an acculturated genealogy of concepts using transnational and perhaps inherently hegemonic threads
of Anglo feminist discourse for the legitimacy and enrichment of Malaysian feminist and queer activism.
Marjaana Jauhola, University of Helsinki, Finland
Intersectionality, Memory, and Politics of Mapping Queer Lives in Aceh
The paper aims to reflect upon the politics of global academic and feminist activist circulation of concepts such
as ‘lbgti’, ‘queer’, and ‘intersectionality’ by discussing preliminary findings of a postdoctoral ethnographic
study conducted in 2012 in the streets of provincial capital Banda Aceh. The overall aim of the research is to
map post-disaster (Indian Ocean tsunami 2004 and 30 decades long armed conflict) memoryscapes, i.e. the
social and spatial vernacular memory as an site of struggle: provoking norms in relation to gender, class, caste,
ethnicity, sexuality, and religion, in particular through normative calls for piety and propriety. The analysis
draws from ethnographic data around the liminal spaces of religious, gender and sexual minorities, and punks,
and the attempts by the provincial and municipality government to normalise subjects in accordance with their
visions, such as ahklah dan aqidah (morality and belief) and pious adolescence.
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