Tuesdays 1-3 Silverstone Building Room 327, University of Sussex
Week 1, January 22nd
Emilomo Ogbe (Institute of Development Studies) ‘The Construction of The Nigerian Identity’: The Intersections of Enforced Heteronormativity and Colonialism
Week 2, January 29th
Claire Bennett (University of Sussex) Lesbian Asylum Seekers: Talking about ‘Violence’ and ‘Sexuality’ During the Legal Asylum Process
Dr Sibel Safi (University College London) Honour killing asylum applications of Turkish asylum seekers in the UK and the asylum gender gap
Week 3, February 5th
Morna Laing (London College of Fashion) Nostalgic Glue: ‘Re-unifying’ the Female Subject through Childlike Femininity
Week 4, February 12th
Divya Mehta (University of Sussex) History as Gendered Archetype in Carlos Fuentes’ The Death of Artemio Cruz
Week 5, February 19th
Novidayanti Hayid (University of Sheffield) Waria and Islam in Indonesia: How do Warias negotiate their gender and sexual identity?
Maria Corral Fernandez (University of Sussex) Palestinian queers in Israel/Palestine: political concerns and potential challenges to the status quo
Week 6, February 26th
Gilda Nunez, (University of Barcelona) Deprivation and drug dealing: a comparative study from the female perspective
Week 7, March 5th
Special Event for International Women’s Day, Pink Ribbons Inc Screening and Debate
Week 8, March 14th
First meeting of the NGender feminist book group, reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. 5pm-6pm in Bramber 252
Week 9, March 19th
Lorena Fuentes (Birkbeck) Bringing Political Economy Back-In: Theorizing the Femicides of Maquila Workers in Guatemala
Laura Joyce (University of Sussex) Reproducing Violence: Rihanna, Chris Brown and the Aestheticization of the Ciudad Juarez Femicides
Week 10, March 26th
Padmini Iyer (University of Sussex) Gender, sexuality and schooling: researching the new sex education curriculum in Delhi, India
Week 11, April 9th
Anais Bertrand-Dansereau (Graduate Institute, Geneva) “She drank Surf and she had a serious illness”: Peer interviewing and young people’s stories of abortion in Malawi
Week 12, April 17th – Fifty Shades of Grey End of Term Social
Naomi Booth (University of Sussex) Succumbing to the Power of Capital: Female Masochism and the Retrograde Swoon in the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy
With discussant Rachel Wood (University of Sussex)
To round off what has been an eventful and controversial term throughout Sussex, we are pleased to invite you to the NGender end of term social, Wednesday 17th April, from 4-6pm in Bramber 242.
For those of you who missed out on the heated debates during the conference “Fifty Shades of Grey: An Inquiry into Dangerous Things” at the University of Brighton 3-4th April, don’t worry you’ll have a second chance! Our event will provide a forum to discover and discuss scholarly and feminist approaches to the Fifty Shades of Grey triology of erotic romance novels, as well as to partake in general banter, and sample some wine, juice and nibbles.
Naomi Booth, an English PhD student at Sussex will give her paper ‘Bathetic Masochism: Fifty Shades of Grey and the Feminine Art of Sinking‘ (full abstract below) to be followed by questions and discussion. There will then be a chance for wider debate around the novels and questions arising from them as both texts and cultural objects.
We suggest that all participants read the novels (or a good summary if time doesn’t permit!) to allow them to take part in the debate.
We hope to see you there for a final lively session, and to thank everyone who has made this term’s series such a success.
Abstract:
The female love-swoon has made a spectacular come-back. In this paper, I will argue that the 21st-century resurgence of the girls-only swoon in EL James’s Fifty Shades trilogy raises troubling questions about the eroticisation of female physical vulnerability. Much has been made in press discussion of the novels’ “racy” BDSM content and of the “aspirational” masochism they promote. I wish to suggest that the BDSM content of the novels is somewhat of a media red-herring: while submission is central to the novels, this is not effected most forcefully through the meagre amounts of physical punishment actually described. Rather, submission in these novels is to the insidious power of capital, and to the masochistic romance created by James around it. Seduction in these novels means succumbing to a life of extreme luxury sanctioned by a powerful man, rather than primarily or only to a sexual relationship with him. In my reading of the Fifty Shades novels, I will focus on the swoons and faints to which the central character, Anastasia Steele, is prone as the initiation of a process of undoing of the female subject, a process of disequilibrium which is rebalanced in clichés of intimacy in thrall to the erotic charge of capital; where to “fall” in love is an admission of female physical insufficiency in the face of masculine financial protection and power.
