Interuniversity Gender Research Seminar 2019 – Centre for research on Culture and Gender

9-11 September 2019: Embodiment and the Performativity of Gender

Having an interdisciplinary focus, since 2010, this yearly course, jointly organised by Ghent University, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the University of Antwerp, provides PhD and advanced MA students whose research is situated in or related to the field of Gender and/or Diversity Studies with in-depth and advanced training in contemporary Gender Studies and theory and methodology in related fields, such as Sexuality Studies, Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, etc., next to general scholarly skills such as reading, writing, discussing and presenting. The course is not limited to issues of gender alone, but aims to attract students broadly interested in subjectivity, identity, diversity and agency and questions of (in)equality and power in society and culture from a critical research perspective.

This year’s focus in on Embodiment and the Performativity of Gender. Questioning an overriding focus on the female body as an object of processes of domination and control, contemporary gender scholarship is giving increased attention to embodied practices as mundane sites that entail both compliance and subversion and give way to diverse forms of agency. The notion of gender performativity, i.e. that gender identity is constituted through performance that emerges from within the existing matrix of discursive power, is crucial in this regard. The course will familiarize students with this major topic in gender studies while giving critical awareness of the current call for an intersectional approach in research on embodiment and performance. Beyond explaining the main concepts, the speakers will discuss the bodily enactment of gendered subjectivities as they are shaped by different dimensions such as age, class, culture and religion. This will highlight the complexity of assessing gendered empowerment and of comparing embodied practices and related discourses cross-culturally.

Format

The course will consist of three lectures and three masterclasses. The lectures will last one hour each and be open to the scholarly public. Each lecture will be followed by a discussion of one hour with the audience moderated by a respondent.

Students will prepare reading assignments before each masterclass. During the masterclass, which will last three hours, the lecturers will discuss the readings in exchange with students. Student will reflect on their own research, on how they have dealt with or intend to deal with bodily enactments of gendered subjectivities and which questions arise in this respect, both of a conceptual and practical nature. The objective of the masterclass is to give guidance to the students on how to proceed further with their research.

Level

The course is open to PhD students from a variety of disciplines (including anthropology, area studies, arts, communication and media studies, economics, education, gender and diversity studies, linguistics, literature, geography, history, moral sciences, performance studies, philosophy, political studies, religion studies, sociology). No prior knowledge is requested.

Programme

DAY ONE: 9 SEPTEMBER 2019

10.00-12.00: Lecture 1

Shelley Budgeon (University of Birmingham): Embodying Neoliberal Femininity

Chair: Gily Coene (Free University of Brussels)

This lecture will provide an introduction to recent feminist scholarship which seeks to theorise and critically evaluate the complex relationship between neoliberalism and feminism. We will consider how this relationship has produced expectations for the performance of gendered selfhood in accordance with qualities of individuality, autonomy, confidence and freedom. Key characteristics of ‘neoliberal femininity’ and its normative functioning across a range of substantive areas will be analysed including beauty and body practices; consumerism and consumption; and work and organizational cultures. We will further analyse this production of selfhood through the lens of intersectionality and transnationalism to critically evaluate the role it plays in the reproduction of inequality.

Respondent: Chia Longman (Ghent University)

13.30-16.30: Masterclass by Shelly Budgeon and Katrien de Graeve (Ghent University)

DAY TWO: 10 SEPTEMBER 2019

10.00-12.00: Lecture 2

Paul Boyce (University of Sussex): Sexual Worldings

Chair: Karen Celis (Free University of Brussels)

This talk considers ways in which global health rubrics employed for the creation of evidence about sexual subjects in international HIV prevention research and programming may comprise an affective component of ‘sexual worldings.’ By this I mean to evoke a recursive, connected relationship between data production about sexualities and everyday sexual experiencing. I explore such actions as indicative of ways in which (queer) life-worlds may be typified by concealment even at the point at which they might be bound up in knowledge making activities. I connect such perspectives to Heidegger’s concept of Dasein as bearing qualities that are hidden. I explore such ideas in reference to life-contexts in and around HIV prevention community-projects in India as an example. In doing so I consider how terms such as ‘MSM’ (and other public health designations) might ‘think’ their subjects – as categories in varied orientations toward sexual being-in-the-world.

Respondent: Tom Claes (Ghent University)

13.30-16.30: Masterclass by Paul Boyce and Ladan Rahbari (Ghent University)

DAY THREE: 11 SEPTEMBER 2019

10.00-12.00: Lecture 3

Anna Andreeva (University of Heidelberg): The Women’s Arts Only? Managing Childbirth in Medieval Japan

Chair: Carine Plancke (Ghent University)

The organization of childbirth in elite households of medieval Japan required serious planning and swift orchestration. Although the initial preparations for it could take several months, the labour could easily escalate into both medical and ritual emergency and necessitate an urgent response from the female and male relatives, ritual specialists, physicians, and midwives. Based on recently discovered medico-religious manuscripts and court protocols dating between 1118 and 1337, this lecture will focus on the “gendered choreographies” of childbirth taking place inside and outside of the secluded birth chamber, that is, the actions of people who inhabited such spaces during the tense moments of royal consort’s labour. Closed to male physicians, relatives, and ritual specialists and accessible only to female assistants and ladies-in-waiting, the birth chamber and its immediate surroundings will thus serve as a stage for practicing the various “arts of judgment” and gendered knowledge by both women and men, who specialized in midwifery, Buddhist rituals, Chinese traditional healing or administration of drugs, exorcism, and calculative divination.

Respondent: Ann Heirman (Ghent University)

13.30-16.30: Masterclass by Anna Andreev and Angelika Koch (Ghent University)

Lectures

The lectures are open to the public.
Venue: Campus Boekentoren, Building Blandijn, Auditorium Jaap Kruithof, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent
Time: 10:00-12:00

LECTURE 1: MONDAY 9 SEPTEMBER 2019

Shelley Budgeon (University of Birmingham)Shelley Budgeon is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology who specializes in gender and feminist theory. Her research concentrates on how various forces of social change impact on the constitution of gender relations and the performance of gendered identities. Her expertise encompasses theories of gendered subjectivity; embodiment; feminist politics; theories of new materialism; gender, postfeminism and neoliberalism; sexuality and personal life; and gendered organizations. Her books include Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Gender in Late Modernity(Palgrave, 2011) and Choosing a Self: Young Women and the Individualization of Identity(Praegar, 2003). She has co-edited a special issue of Current Sociology on “Cultures of Intimacy and Care Beyond ‘The Family’ and has published in a wide range of journals including Sociology; Gender, Work and Organisation; Sexualities; Body & Society; European Journal of Women’s Studies; Sociological Research Online; and Women’s Studies International Forum. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia Institute for Gender, ‘Race’, Sexuality and Social Justice and at the Monash University Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research.

Title of lecture: Embodying Neoliberal Femininity

LECTURE 2: TUESDAY 10 SEPTEMBER 2019

Paul Boyce (University of Sussex)

Paul Boyce is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and International Development at the University of Sussex. His forthcoming edited book is entitled “Queering Knowledge: Analytics, Devices and Investments after Marilyn Strathern'” He is currently preparing a monograph entitled “Sexualities, HIV and Ethnography: Sexual Worldings and Queer Misrecognitions in India”.

Title of lecture: Sexual Worldings

LECTURE 3: WEDNESDAY 11 SEPTEMBER 2019

Anna Andreeva (University of Heidelberg)

Anna Andreeva specialises in the religious and cultural history of pre-modern Japan and is especially interested in esoteric Buddhism as well as East Asian histories of gender and medicine. She earned her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2007, and since then worked as a postdoctoral or research fellow at Harvard, Cambridge, the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto, and Heidelberg. In 2016–2017, she was a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and International Consortium for the Study of the Humanities at Erlangen, and a visiting professor and chair of Japanese History at Bochum. Anna Andreeva is a co-editor of Transforming the Void: Embryological Discourse and Reproductive Imagery in East Asian Religions (with Dominic Steavu, Leiden: Brill, 2016). Her first monograph, Assembling Shinto: Buddhist Approaches to Kami Worship in Medieval Japanwas published by Harvard Asia Center in 2017. She is the author of many articles on medieval Japanese religions and is currently working on her second monograph on the cultural history of childbirth in medieval Japan.

Title of lecture: The Women’s Arts Only? Managing Childbirth in Medieval Japan

Master Classes

Master classes are open to all PhD students and advanced Master students with an interest in gender & diversity.

Registration by sending an email to: carine.plancke@ugent.be (Registraion deadline is September 1, 2019).
Please include your name, affiliation and a brief description of your research and research methods.
The readings will be provided to the participants by email.
Venue: Campus Boekentoren, Building Blandijn, Room 120.012, Blandijnberg 2 9000 Ghent

Master Class Shelley Budgeon & Katrien De Graeve: Embodying neoliberal femininity

9 September, 13:30-16:30

The session will begin with a 45 minute lecture which will briefly contextualise challenges presented to feminism by the establishment of neoliberal hegemony before critically ‘unpacking’ a range of key concepts including postfeminism, neoliberal governmentality, entrepreneurial subjectivity, and technologies of gender. The lecture will be followed by a Q & A session in which the following questions will orient the discussion. In preparation for the discussion please complete these questions prior to the session.

To what extent are we witnessing a resurgence of feminism?
Has feminism become unwittingly complicit in the reproduction of social inequality? Why/why not?
How can we conceptualise the power relations that constitute neoliberal gendered subjects?
Can neoliberalism be resisted by feminism? What are the main strategies associated with resistance?
What are the implications of critiques of ‘neoliberal femininity’ for transnational feminism? Do these critiques translate to non-Western contexts? Why/why not

Readings:

Rottenberg, Catherine. 2014. “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism”. Cultural Studies, 28(3): 418-37.
Gill, Rosalind and Orgad, Shani. 2015. “The Confidence Cult(ure)”. Australian Feminist Studies, 30(86): 324-44.
Eschle, Catherine and Maiguashca, Bice. 2018. “Theorising Feminist Organising in and Against Neoliberalism: Beyond Co-optation and Resistance?” European Journal of Politics and Gender, 1(1):223-39.
Dosekun, Simidele. 2015. “For Western Girls Only?” Feminist Media Studies, 15(6): 960-75.

Assignment:

Please reflect upon one of the concepts/frameworks associated with the critique of neoliberal femininity/feminism and apply it to an aspect of your own research. How useful is this approach? What insights does this concept facilitate? What are some of its limitation? (up to 1000 words)

Master Class: Paul Boyce & Ladan Rahbari: Sexual Worldings

10 September, 13:30-16:30

The first part of the master class will start with a 45-minute lecture by Paul Boyce titled “Sexual Worldings”. Paul Boyce is a lecturer in Anthropology and International Development in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex.

In this lecture, Paul Boyce will introduce the key theories, concepts and ideas on sexual life-worlds as they might be understood in relation to knowledge making activities and everyday experience. These themes are explored through the example of HIV prevention work in India. Much global health work seeks to define sexualities in respect of determining categories and quantifiable attributes. In the lecture we will consider how such an approach occludes focus on the ‘messiness’ of sexual being-in-the-world. This perspective re-orients research focus away from imaginaries of the individuated sexual subject toward a conceiving of Dasein, Heideggers term for designating qualities for worldly being whereby world and being might be regard as isomorphic. While it is not the intent of the lecture to offer a detailed philosophical account we will consider some practical aspects of such thinking as it might query the object of sexualities studies.

The lecture will be followed by a Q&A session in which the participates will be given the chance to ask questions on the lecturer.

After a short break, in the second part of the master class, the participants will discuss the questions that they have prepared beforehand (see assignments) in group(s), and then they will choose 1-2 key questions to discuss will Paul Boyce. The lecturer will then engage with the participant groups and will guide the discussions on the selected main issues.

Compulsory reading and listening tasks:

Boyce, P. (2007). Conceiving Kothis: Men who have sex with men in India and the Cultural Subject of HIV Prevention, Medical Anthropology, Vol 26, No. 2
Manalansan, M. (2015). Queer Worldings: The Messy Art of Being Global in Manila and New York. Antipode, Vol. 7 No. 3
The podcast: “Worlding with the Body, Society for Cultural Anthropology” https://culanth.org/fieldsights/worlding-with-the-body (participants should have listed to this podcast before the master class)

Suggested reading:

Lorway, R., Rezha-Paul S. and Pasha A. (2009) On Becoming a Male Sex Worker in Mysore. Medical Anthropology Quartlerly, Vol 23, Issue 2

Assignment:

Send a package of assignment 1&2 at least two weeks before the master class date (before August 27, 2019) to Ladan Rahbari (Ladan.Rahbari@UGent.be). Assignment 3 is orally presented during the master class:

Prepare an abstract of 200-300 words on a research project/interest that you are engaged with. Kindly outline the subject and its connection to the master class topic in this abstract (please don’t forget your names and affiliations in this file);
Please read the compulsory texts and listen to the podcast “Worlding with the Body, Society for Cultural Anthropology” before attending the master class. Try to reflect upon the new concepts and frameworks that you encounter in the reading/listening tasks. Based on your own research interests, and the reading/listening tasks, prepare three key questions that you would like to discuss during the master class. Please send the questions in the same document, just under the abstract;
Prepare a max two-minute introduction of yourself (focus on your (i) disciplinary background, (ii) research interests, and (iii) what brought you to this master class).

Master Class: Anna Andreeva & Angelika Koch: Sex, Gender, and the Body in pre-1900 Japan

11 September, 13:30-16:30

This masterclass will focus on the historical notions of sex, gender, and the body in premodern Japan before the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Charting the historical and cross-cultural entanglements of different spheres of knowledge, such as Buddhism, Shinto, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and European medicine, we will discuss the permutations of ideas about the body and Japan’s historical configurations of sex and gender during the medieval and early modern times.

Readings:

Selby, Martha Ann, 2006. “Narratives of Conception, Gestation, and Labour in Sanskrit Ayurvedic Sources.” Asian Medicine1(2): 254–275.
Ming, Chen, 2006. “Turning Female into Male,” Asian Medicine1(2): 315–334.
Andreeva, Anna, 2017. “Childbirth in Early Medieval Japan” in C. Pierce Salguero (ed.), Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology. New York: Columbia University Press, 336-350.
Sterling, Anne Fausto, 2000. ‘Dueling Dualisms’, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality.New York: Basic Books & Koch, Angelika Sexual Healing. Sexuality, Health and the Male Body in Early Modern Japan(book manuscript) (excerpts)

Assignment:

a) Prepare a 300-word outline of the new insights about the historical notions of gender in Japan (and broader East and South Asia) that you gained from any two readings.

b) Based on all the readings, prepare 2-3 questions related to the historical dynamics and complexities of ideas about sex, body, and gender in premodern Japan. How does this new knowledge relate to your own research?

c) Based on the proposed readings and images, prepare the discussion questions.

Medieval Japan:

Is there a kind of knowledge that is specific to gender? Can you describe it?
Does such knowledge stay static? Does it move between genders, spaces, and times?
Can a gender be changed? How? What for?
Based on reading 3 [pp. 339–346 only], can you identify any structures or scenes of male observation of women? Why would such structures need to exist?
Based on reading 3 [pp. 339–346 only], can you identify spaces, types of knowledge, and actions that are inhabited and performed by women only and with cooperation of men?
How do women and men control the bodily time of their own and others?

Early modern Japan:

What is ‘sex’? How is it currently defined legally/medically?
How many sexes are there (now/historically)?
What is Faust-Sterling’s scholarly position? What is her field of specialization?
Look at Image 1 below, which represents the body from the viewpoint of Chinese-style medicine (kanpō). How would you describe it in terms of sex? Which features are you basing your argument on?
In Image 2, how do the male and female body compare? Is there any division line drawn between them in terms of sex and if so, how?
Image 3 represents one of the earliest examples of a Western-style anatomical depiction in Japan. How would you understand its implications about sex?

Info and registration

Registration

Master classes open to all PhD students and advanced Master students with an interest in with an interest in gender & diversity.

Registration by sending an email to: Carine.Plancke@UGent.be (before 1 September 2019).

Please include your name, affiliation, the doctoral school you are a member of and a brief description of your research and research methods, and why you would want to join the programme. The organizing committee will select those students who they think would receive the most benefit from participating in the programme. Students who register for the full programme will be given priority.

For further information & questions: Carine.Plancke@UGent.be

Number of participants

Max. 25 during master classes
Lectures are free and open to everyone.

Language

English

Teaching and learning material

Texts for discussion for registered students will be sent by email.

Evaluation criteria (doctoral training programme)

This course is interdisciplinary in focus and offered to PhD students of all universities, who on completion can receive a ‘proof of successful participation’, which can be recognized by their home PhD programme. MA students can also apply for registration on an individual basis and receive ‘proof of successful participation’.

Requirements for receiving credits: Three days programme with 15 contact hours.

– Morning and evening lectures: The students attend all lectures.
– Master Classes: The students attend the three master classes.
– Assignments:
+ The students prepare reading assignments for all lectures & master classes (two to four articles or book chapter per master class, chosen by the lecturers)
+ The students prepare the assignments for the three master classes (instructions see ‘Master Classes’)

Venue

Lectures: Campus Boekentoren, Building Blandijn, Auditorium Jaap Kruithof, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent
Master Classes: Campus Boekentoren, Building Blandijn, Room 120.012, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent

Organising committee

Coordination

Dr. Carine Plancke (Centre for Research on Culture and Gender, Ghent University)

Organizing Committee

Dr. Katrien de Graeve (Centre for Research on Culture and Gender, Ghent University)
Dr. Carine Plancke (Centre for Research on Culture and Gender, Ghent University)
Dr. Ladan Rahbari (Centre for Research on Culture and Gender, Ghent University)

Scientific Committee

Prof. dr. Gily Coene (RHEA Expertisecentrum Gender, diversiteit & intersectionaliteit, VUB)
Prof. dr. Ann Heirman (Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies, Ghent University)
Prof. dr. Chia Longman (Centre for Research on Culture and Gender, Ghent University)
Prof. dr. Petra Meier (Research Group on Citizenship, Equality & Diversity, University of Antwerp)
Prof. dr. Andreas Niehaus (Centre for Research on Body Cultures in Motion, Ghent University)