Synaesthetic Politics and Transgender Films

Speaker: Wibke Straube

Chair: Daniel Ploeger

Abstract

I am working on Transgender Feature Films, meaning films whose narratives predominantly deal with the gender trouble or gender transition of the protagonists –sometimes the main character is a child, like in the Belgium film Ma Vie en Rose (Dir.: Alain Berliner, FR/B/JAP 1997) or the person is aiming for sex reassignment surgery later in life, like the main protagonist Bree in Transamerica (Dir.: Duncan Tucker, USA 2005). Genre-wise the films are very different, usually they are connected to melodrama or drama comedy in the form of a roadmovie, musical, music film, coming-of-age story, etc. I am very interested in de-privileging the visual paradim within film and film analysis – I am not really sure, yet, how methodologically, but in terms of my theoretical framework, I am strongly turning towards the haptic sense as well as to hearing – all three senses, hearing, touch, and vision are very important in terms of the narration of trans subjectivity as something else than a normalised mainstream story which is easily digestable for a noninformed, “straight“ audience.

I am working on the development of a political concept for the dynamics, I see as vital and important within trans films – meaning, image politics that point to an elsewhere and that have affirmative rather than normalising dimensions. I momentarily summarise it as Synaethetic Politics – that gathers the merging of different senses and the effects of this on trans embodiment. Normalisation is a strong topic within mainstream trans films, but I find myself to be more curious about the “exit points“ (Rosi Braidotti), the “counter“ narratives and the narrative gaps within the film, that enable a non-deterministic perspective on gender and further identity categories and include glimpses into utopian structures of life.

___________bio:

Wibke Straube is a Gender Studies Researcher at Linköping University in hir second year. S_he handed in hir M.A. thesis in Gender and Media Studies in 2002 at Sussex University on the hate crime case of Brandon Teena and the negotiation of gender ambiguity in mainstream media. S_he mostly lives in Linköping and sometimes in Berlin. Wibke has been co-organising queer art exhibitions, film festivals, writes sometimes interviews and articles for fanzines and feminist journals, sees hirself as part of the queerfeminist scene in Berlin and right now, co-organises a lecture series at Linköping University. Hir academic areas of interest are Queer and Feminist Visual Studies, Cultural Studies, Disability and Postcolonial Studie as well as in general film, art, media, materialism, critical discourse analysis, Deleuze, affect, post/modernity, and the posthumanities.

Speaker: Hannah Warren (Anthropology, Sussex)

Title: ‘Gender is about men too? Gender and Development work in two NGOs in Ghana’

Chair: Synne Laastad Dyvik

Abstract

This paper is based on findings from my ethnographic study of two local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Ghana – one development NGO and one women’s rights NGO. This research focused on the ‘gender’ and ‘women’s rights’ work of these organisations and, the staff working within them.

The paper explores one of the themes from the research – the different ways in which people in these two organisations talked about the inclusion of, and concerns about, men in relation to gender and women’s rights work. This includes for example: concerns (or not) about the neglect of men in ‘gender’ and ‘women’s rights’ work; ideas that ‘gender’ and ‘gender work’ should be about men too; various anxieties about focusing mainly on women; and explicit references to men and how they are also affected, when talking about issues such as domestic violence. Within the paper I provide some specific examples, and attempt to draw out, in relation to this issue, some of the differences and similarities between various individuals and the two organisations researched.

Amanda Kidd: ‘Beauty Therapy Training: Symbolic Violence and the Reproduction of Femininity‘

Chair: Laurence Clennett-Sirois

Abstract

This paper discusses some key issues arising from my doctoral research on young women’s experiences of NVQ beauty therapy courses in two further education colleges in the south west of England. In particular, it will explore how the students’ affective ties to beauty may function as a form of symbolic violence, obscuring its role in the production of sexual difference and inequality and erasing awareness of what ‘second wave’ feminists have understood as the violence inherent in sexual objectification.

Drawing particularly on the work of Bartky (1990), Skeggs (1997), Gill (2007) and McRobbie (2009), I suggest that beauty therapy students’ engagement with bodily self-presentation is an ideal site for understanding how dominant ideologies of gender and (hetero)sexuality are ‘made real’ in the production of subjects who experience beauty as beneficial and ‘pleasurable’. Contrary to those who argue that women’s pleasure in ‘doing looks’ is testimony to their autonomy and ‘choice’ in using beauty practices for their own ends, I consider the idea that the pleasures experienced by students in learning and doing beauty are both produced in the context of social power relations and play a central role in pulling them into normative gendered and (hetero)sexualised and identities.

Bio:

Amanda is a third year PhD student at the university of Bristol, researching beauty therapy students in FE colleges in the south west of England. Her  research focuses on the relationship between beauty therapy training courses in further education and the construction of gendered subjectivity and inequality. It is concerned with why young women choose to enroll on beauty therapy programmes and how these programmes might contribute to the shaping of gendered identities and inequalities. It is also concerned with the extent to which western beauty practices fit the UN definition of traditional practices harmful to the well-being and social status of women and girls (Jeffreys, 2005), and can therefore be understood as a form of violence against women.  In the light of this, the research also sets out to examine how the construction of gendered difference/inequality on beauty courses might involve violence in symbolic forms (Bourdieu, 2001) and how this might relate to other forms of gendered violence, for instance, structural, physical or psychological (Bourgois, 2001) experienced by the trainees in and outside the classroom’.

Speaker: Aristea Fotopoulou

Title: ‘Feminist publics and policy shifts around egg donation’

Chair: Dr. Kate O’Riordan

Abstract

Feminist politics have a long historical engagement with reproductive technologies. This paper studies some emerging networks relating to policy shifts around the issues of egg donation and trade, for reproduction and genetic research in the UK. My question is how we can think about feminist politics in a world which is increasingly saturated by information and biological technologies.

The paper briefly traces feminist responses to policy shifts in the 1980s and focuses on responses to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) consultations for the review of donor payment in 2006 and in 2011. It analyses various texts, including online campaign sites, in terms of their themes, ideological claims and encouraged readings. In this process, I examine the specificities of contemporary interventions and the continuities with earlier ones.

The paper concludes by noting the kinds of political subjectivities which are being enabled in the observed networks.

Biography

Aristea Fotopoulou (Doctoral Candidate in Media and Cultural Studies, Sussex) is researching the impact of digital media and information technologies on understandings and expressions of feminist and queer politics.

Cassandra Smith (English, Sussex)

‘Reclaiming Scars: Thinking through Trans Bodies’

Chair: Dr. Akshay Khanna (IDS)

Abstract: This paper is based on my Masters dissertation. I am based in the Sexual Dissidence in Literature and Culture programme at the University of Sussex.

Jay Prosser has argued that Judith Butler’s usage of trans identities to mobilise queer and to refute essentialist feminist narratives has foreclosed the material and embodied aspects of trans-experience from theorisation. He has suggested a turn of trans theory away from Butlerian Queer Theory and towards Corporeal Feminism(s). This paper reads this turn as a shifting of relational or genealogical orientation, or perhaps fidelity/ allegiance, within the structure of the theoretical family tree, and examines the implications of such a move.

The conclusions Prosser draws about the trans relation to the material body are potentially re- essentialising and reductive, and in taking up his work I seek to avoid recapitulating these problems. At the same time, I expand upon the connections he draws between Trans Theory and Corporeal Feminism in order to explore how power, agency and resistance may operate through the relationship between the body and the text within trans medical and autobiographical narratives.

I will discuss how historically within the (trans) medical and autobiographical genres oppressive constructions of the body/ text relationship have been used to strip trans subjects of their agency. Taking up Jane Gallop’s notion of “thinking through the body” I will ask how, in response to this, we might we “think through the trans body/trans bodies” as bodies of resistance. In addressing this question I will look specifically at Prosser’s idea of the subject in/as transition; Gallop’s concept of “trans-genre” narratives; the motiff of “the scar” within trans narratives; and Sarah Ahmed’s work on sensitivity to stigma as a queer methodology.

Bio

I am a second year Masters student (part-time) in the Sexual Dissidence in Literature and Culture programme. Within my general research and activism I am interested in furthering an agenda that is queer, feminist and anti-racist; that is sex and kink positive; and that addresses the needs of those who have experienced gender based violence and/or who have mental health issues. Within this paper I address specifically my interest in the relationship between Transgender and Feminist Theory and the role of affect and the body in theory.

Speaker: Rachel Wood (Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex)

Intelligible sexualities in and out of the closet

Chair: Andy Medhurst

Abstract: This paper argues that the closet is a constitutive spatial metaphor in lesbian and gay discourse. The contradictions inherant to the inside/outside binary are apparent not only in the discourse of the closet, but also in its material manifestation. The paper traces the changes in the spatial arrangements of lesbian and gay spaces, from spaces that inscribe the secrecy and shame of the closet to those that represent an ‘out’ and proud identity, questioning which bodies can be coded and read as out in out spaces.

Speaker: Michal Jahns (Linguistics, Roehampton University) - ‘Debating Gender and Language’ – Chair: Dr. Olu Jenzen

Abstract: Drawing on my doctoral research on the feminist debate on language in Poland, the aim of my presentation will be to raise questions about the epistemological status of feminist cultural critique. I will briefly discuss the specific features of the debate on linguistic sexism in the Polish context. The characteristic will be based on examples from three sources of data: (1) gender and language academic literature; (2) in-depth interviews conducted with members of the Feminist Critique Research Centre at a Polish university; and (3) from essays on the subject of gender and language written by secondary-school pupils. The feminist interpretation of masculine bias of the Polish language will be then compared with critical analyses of other cultural phenomena: advertisement campaigns based on gender stereotypes and patriarchal images of the world present in the Bible. Irvine and Gal’s (2000) notion of fractal recursivity will be used to show how similar interpretations resurface in analyses of substantially different phenomena. I will argue that interpretations drawn from the reflection on linguistic structure are a widespread common-sense way of negotiating social norms and values, and as such, are a promising and under-researched field of study. However, I will be critical of the cases in which feminist scholars present one particular interpretation as “self-evident”, as it happens in example (1). I will conclude by pointing at some possible consequences that my argument may have for feminist, or otherwise critical, analysis of cultural phenomena other than the language.

Bio

Michal Jahns is a first-year student of an MPhil/PhD course in Linguistics at Roehampton University in London under the supervision of Prof. Tope Omoniyi and Dr. Annabelle Mooney. His research project investigates the interplay between linguistic ideologies and linguistic practices in the context of the feminist debate on language in Poland. He received an MA in Linguistics form Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland and is working on completing an MA these in Sociology form the same institution. His research interests include gender and language, language ideologies, applied linguistics and sociology of religion.

Benjamin Michael Litherland (Media and Film, Sussex)

‘Hitman vs Fatton’s Tale of the Tape: Boxing, Binging and Masculinity’

Chair: Nick McGlynn

Abstract

The body of boxer Ricky Hatton has occupied two distinct but related discourses in the popular press: chiselled, muscular fighting machine, nicknamed ‘The Hitman’ in the sports pages, and flabby, binge-drinking, grotesque symbol of excess, affectionately if somewhat cruelly dubbed ‘Ricky Fatton’ by opponents and reporters alike. In both instances Hatton’s body was dissected and discussed with implicit and explicit detail and his anatomy analysed in a manner usually reserved for female celebrities; but where female bodies are almost exclusively described in overtly sexualised terms, Hatton’s body offered a seemingly more confused reading. If, as Dyer has suggested, stars serve to reconcile contradictions, the body of Hatton represents two contrary views of the working-class male body in late-capitalism: it is a site of production, discipline and action, all historically masculine traits; but it is also vulnerable to feminised hedonism and passive consumption in the unrelenting search for uncontrolled please. Where muscles connote self-discipline, strength and individualism, and soft bodies represent welfare dependency, weakness and deficiency, what are we to make of Ricky Hatton? The presentation, then, will analyse the ideology of Hatton’s body, paying particular attention to the hegemony of sport in general and boxing in particular, and its relationship to heterosexual masculinity, race and class; the competing commodification and subjugation of the male body; and the anxieties and pleasures elicited from the working-class male body in popular culture. In short, what do the tabloid’s reactions to Hatton tell us about our relationship to our own bodies?

Ben’s Research interests are: sociology of sport; sport and leisure history; popular culture history; the body and popular culture.

Title: ‘Gender Studies is Relevant But…: Interrogating the Partial Recognition of Feminist Scholarship in the Social Sciences’

Abstract:

Many women’s, gender, feminist studies (WGFS) scholars see the field as a project of both intellectual and critical/political intervention in the academy; for them, the two are closely articulated and impossible to separate. However, the production of a separation between WGFS’ intellectual and critical/political dimensions has been a defining characteristic of many non-WGFS academics’ engagements with WGFS. Accounts from several countries and disciplines have noted that much mainstream scholarship recognises some of WGFS’ analytical insights, but often bypasses or rejects WGFS critiques of dominant standards and tools of academic knowledge production. In this paper, I draw on an ethnographic study of Portuguese academia (inspired by feminist epistemology, Foucauldian scholarship, and science and technology studies) to analyse these forms of partial recognition of WGFS. I observed non-WGFS scholars speaking in conferences and classrooms and found that they generally describe WGFS as a field that can produce credible and relevant contributions to the social sciences and humanities, but only up to a certain point or only if/when done in a certain way. I will present examples of these discourses and analyse their structure, content and particularly their uses of humour, in an attempt to examine how boundaries of scientificity are drawn in them and how WGFS is positioned in relation to those boundaries. I show that this boundary-work produces a representation of WGFS as a field that is partly within, and partly outside, the space of ‘proper’ knowledge, a process that I call an epistemic splitting of WGFS. I argue that this splitting makes it possible for non-WGFS scholars to engage with WGFS in a selective way, because it acts as a supposedly legitimate epistemic rationale for acknowledging WGFS contributions which fit mainstream frameworks, while simultaneously rejecting as not ‘proper’ academic knowledge, and therefore as justifiably dismissible, feminist critiques of those frameworks.

Biography:

Maria do Mar Pereira is finishing her thesis on the PhD Gender programme at the Gender Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science). She holds a graduate degree in Sociology from the Lisbon University Institute (ISCTE-IUL), for which she undertook an ethnographic study of the negotiation of gender among teenagers in a school in Lisbon. Her current research analyses the epistemic status of women’s, gender, feminist studies, i.e. the degree to which WGFS scholarship is recognised as valid, relevant and authoritative knowledge. She has also published on, and presented papers about, feminist epistemologies and methodologies, men’s discourses about gender, and issues of language difference and translation in social science research.

Speaker : Jane Traies (Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies, Sussex)

‘The Lives of British Lesbians Over Sixty: Early findings’

Chair: Dr Rachel Cohen

All welcome!