Lunch Seminars

During this lunch seminar, Sigrid Wallaert will present her research on feminist anger. In the last few years, after the peak of the #MeToo movement especially, angry women are everywhere. From women’s marches to women’s strikes, women are taking to the streets with their anger and refusing to quiet down. In my research, I take this trend as a starting point to develop the concept of an anger turn (in partial parallel with Sara Ahmed’s happiness turn). This anger turn is characterised by a sudden prominence of anger in the public eye on four main fronts: publishing, media, academia, and politics. However, there is something special about this anger. I outline the concept of feminist anger as a type of activist anger with feminist goals and purposes. This anger is forward-looking, collective, and potentially apt, and should therefore be seriously considered for its communicative value.

Sigrid Wallaert is a PhD researcher in philosophy at Ghent University and FWO Flanders. She holds a master’s and research master’s degree in philosophy. In her PhD project, she is delineating feminist anger as a potentially productive concept, and examining what its value can be through the framework of epistemic injustice. Get to know more about the speaker on her website: www.sigridwallaert.com

Follow the seminar:

On-campus: Faculteitszaal, Blandijnberg 2

Online:  interested participants can register and join on Microsoft Teams

Tessel Veneboer is a PhD student in English Literature at Ghent University. She specializes in queer theory and experimental literature and is a founding member of the Sex Negativity research collective at ASCA. She is currently working on a dissertation on Kathy Acker (supported by FWO).

Kathy Acker’s pseudo-autobiographical writing of sex work challenges the sex-positive politics of écriture féminine as well as a queer politics of embodied writing. Acker’s literary work is often read as sex-positive due to her experiments with masturbatory writing, depiction of graphic sex scenes and interest in s/m relations. My dissertation argues that the avant-garde convictions of Acker’s formal innovation are closer to “sex negativity” as they reveal the structural negativity and the nonsovereignty of the subject, “exemplified in the sexual encounter” (Edelman and Berlant 2013). If sex-positive feminism asks how sexuality can be expressed and affirmed, Kathy Acker’s sex negativity lies in a distrust of knowledge of the self. The radical pessimism of Acker’s work is not directed against sex itself, but refuses to treat sex as a moral issue and instead questions the conditions and implications of self-knowledge and the autobiographical subject.

This lunch seminar will be on-campus only and it will take place at the faculty room of Blandijn (Faculteitszaal, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent). You can register sending an email at carla.besorabarti@ugent.be

In this lunch seminar, Sara Nyssen will talk about her ethnographic research in one of the trainings of non-Dutch speaking care workers. In order to address unemployment among migrant job seekers as well as shortages in the care sector, the Flemish employment service organizes language trainings to prepare non-Dutch speaking job seekers for an education and subsequent employment as a nurse or caregiver. My ethnographic research in one of these trainings shows that knowledge of Dutch was by no means the sole criterion for selection and evaluation: assessment of job seekers was (partly) based on whether they were seen as good (future) care workers. As such, there was a lot of attention for job seekers’ selves in the course, specifically through the use of psychological terminology. In this lunch seminar I will argue that this concern for care workers’ selves cannot be separated from a concern for the people they have to take care of. I will explore what kind of patient emerges from the image of the ideal care worker, and what this reveals about how care work is imagined, and about who is (and isn’t) seen as suitable for care work.

About the speaker

Sara Nyssen holds a master’s degree in social and cultural anthropology and is currently a PhD researcher in sociolinguistics at Ghent University. Her research is an ethnography of a language training for the care sector aimed at migrant job seekers, with a focus on language, labor and personhood.

This lunch seminar will be on-campus only and it will take place at the faculty room of Blandijn (Faculteitszaal, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent). You can register sending an email at carla.besorabarti@ugent.be