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On Tuesday, December 3, 2024, Nika Looman’s public defense will take place. We would like to cordially invite you to attend in person or via live stream.

Nika has been working on their research ‘Queer late/r life sex. Women and non-binary people’s unruly stories’ for four years. To conclude this trajectory, Nika will defend their research and receive their doctorate.

After the defense, there will be a reception where you can congratulate Nika. In support of Palestine and in line with the BDS (boycott, divest and sanctions) guidelines, only coffee and tea will be served.

We hope to see you on this special day. If you have any questions about the defense, please do not hesitate to contact us (mars@essb.eur.nl).
About the research
This dissertation centralizes the unruly sexual stories of queer women and non-binary people between the ages of forty-four and eighty-six. Their stories disrupt the limiting and contradicting narratives of ageing as decline or that promise success when sexual attractiveness and sexual availability are maintained late/r in life.

By paying careful attention to the entangledness of materiality, discourse, and un/expected relations to sex late/r in life, this dissertation examines how stories of old/er queer women and non-binary people can (re)configure prevailing narratives of ageing, sex, and intimacy.

Nika Looman completed their doctoral research within the ERC-project LiLI ‘Later-in-Life Intimacy: Women’s Unruly Practices, Places and Representations’at Ghent University’s Centre for Research on Culture and Gender.
Details

Date and time
Tuesday, 3 December 2024 – 16h00 (GMT+1)
After 16h15 it will not be possible to enter the ceremony hall anymore.

Join in person
Chapel of the Convent of Saint Agnes
Oudezijds Voorburgwal 229-231
1012 EZ Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Join the live stream by simply clicking the link below, no registration required
Queer late/r life sex. Women and non binary people’s unruly stories Online.

The seminar
The topic of gender justice must begin with the inevitable question: what gender is justice? Linda R. Hirshman asks, “Is the law male?” Hirshman’s question points out how the “maleness” of the legal system affects every woman.

Dr. Pan’s lecture will focus on gender justice through the lens of intersectionality to emphasize the necessity of recognizing the interconnectedness as well as differences among categories. Intersectionality challenges traditional notions of justice that treat social categories as separate or distinct.

Instead, it calls for an approach to justice that acknowledges how various systems of oppression (e.g., sexism, casteism, classism) intersect and compound one another. Achieving gender justice, therefore, requires addressing these interconnected forms of oppression holistically.

About the speaker
Dr. Anandita Pan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts, IIT Hyderabad. Her areas of interest are Feminist theory, Gender Studies, and Dalit Feminism. She is the author of Mapping Dalit Feminism: Towards An Intersectional Standpoint (Sage-Stree, 2020) and Aesthetics in India: Transitions and Transformations (Orient Blackswan, 2023). She is the recipient of the President’s Award for Best paper at the IAWS conference, 2020.

9 December 2024
12h00 – 13h30

Join us in person
Ghent University – Campus Tweekerken
Room 1.10
Sint-Pietersplein 7 – 9000 Ghent

Register and attend online
Click here to register and join on Microsoft Teams

Organised by
SANGH – South Asia Network Ghent
CRCG – Center for Research on Culture and Gender

Contact: Hannah.VandenBroucke@UGent.be

Why ‘right-wing woman’ is not an oxymoron: Lessons from the volksmoeder in South Africa

Christi van der Westhuizen

 Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa

christivdw@mandela.ac.za

Abstract

Ethno-racial populisms currently surging across the globe have driven contestation over gender to a fever pitch. Women’s right to political agency and control over their bodies is under direct attack or being strictly circumscribed. Notably, right-wing women are firmly involved in intensified attempts to reverse the gains of successive waves of feminism. This presentation draws on historical research and interviews to make sense of how women come to advance or resist patriarchal politics. The rise and fall and (unexpected) rise of the Afrikaner nationalist volksmoeder (mother of the nation) in South Africa is illustrative of how women are mobilised and demobilised in the service of nationalisms. Afrikaner nationalist women were more publicly and politically active in the first half of the 20^th century than the second half. They vigorously contributed to the version of Afrikaner identity that in 1948 tipped South Africa into the intensified form of colonialism known as apartheid but disappeared from public view after 1948. The volksmoeder assigned feminine care for the family and the volk to women. The flipside of its normalisation of ‘woman/wife-as-mother’ was to return Afrikaner women to the domestic realm with the demand of silence, service, and sexuality purposed for white reproduction, or ‘white sex’. After the transition to constitutional democracy in 1994, the volksmoeder imaginary is unexpectedly bolstered, receiving a revivalist injection from neoliberal and postfeminist versions of motherhood that coax women into an enclave form of nationalism.

Prof Christi van der Westhuizen is an author, academic, political analyst and award-winning media columnist. Her research interests are transdisciplinary, broadly focused on identity, difference, ideology and democracy in postcolonial contexts. She works as an Associate Professor heading up the research programme at the Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy (CANRAD), Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. In 2022, she was a Visiting Professor at the Research Centre Global Dynamics at Leipzig University, Germany. Her monographs are:

• White Power & the Rise and Fall of the National Party(2007) and
• Sitting Pretty: White Afrikaans Women in Postapartheid South Africa(2017).

Christi’s most recent books (as co-editor) are titled The D-Word: Perspectives on Democracy in Tumultuous Times (2023) and the Routledge International Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness (2022). She has published in journals such as Africa Today, Comparativ, African Studies, Critical Philosophy of Race, and Matatu Journal for African Culture and Society. Her Doctorate in Sociology is from the University of Cape Town and she has held associateships with several universities. Christi’s media columns and analysis have featured in both South African and global news outlets.

Female Masculinity and the Business of Emotions in Tokyo investigates the novel “emotion business” of dansō escorting as a phenomenon emerging between gender performativity and pop-culture, commodified relationships and the wish for self-expression.

Fanasca documents the dreams, ambitions and fears of young crossdresser escorts negotiating their identity with and within the Japanese society, as well as those of crossdresser escorts’ clients: women looking for the perfect man and the opportunity to experience emotions. Combining anthropological, sociological and gender studies theories with an ethnographic approach, Fanasca argues that dansō crossdressing is the tool used by a sector of Japanese women to resist the heteronormative and patriarchal society and its expectations, while reinventing themselves and their identities looking for self-actualization.

Female Masculinity and the Business of Emotions Tokyo is an interdisciplinary work which will interest both scholars and students of Japanese studies, gender studies, and anthropology.

Organised by:

CRCG – Centre for Research on Culture and Gender

BOCULT – Centre for Research on Body Cultures in Motion

CARAM – Centre for Anthropological Research on Affect and Materiality

The point of departure of this seminar is the analytical and political urgency to understand Israel/Palestine through the feminist lens of reproductive justice. The State of Israel is known internationally as having adopted remarkably “pronatalist” policies since its creation in 1948, aimed at encouraging high birth rates by offering financial incentives for reproducing large families, welfare benefits for (working) mothers, high child allowances and generous subsidies for assisted reproductive technologies including in vitro fertilisation, egg donation, surrogacy, prenatal and pre-implantation genetic testing, posthumous assisted reproduction, etc. However, critical scholars have been arguing for decades that Israel’s pronatalism is selective, and mostly designed to benefit its European-descended Jewish Israeli citizens and not Palestinians who are framed as a “demographic threat”. In addition to cultural paradigms of “Jewishness” that refer to the importance of reproduction in Jewish culture, religion, and history, this seminar foregrounds a settler colonial analysis of Israel’s stratified reproductive regimes. Situating the crucial role of older and newer technologies of (assisted) reproduction, fertility, and family (un)making within Zionism’s century-old yet ongoing settler colonial history, I will argue that the creation and consolidation of a demographically Jewish state in Israel/Palestine materializes at the expense of Indigenous Palestinian life and reproduction. Using several case studies of reproductive technologies, including egg donation, surrogacy and posthumous sperm-retrieval, I will illustrate how Israel’s selective pronatalism is partly rooted in structures of demographic replacement of Palestinians their collective means and infrastructures of life, biological and social reproduction. (Image credit to @marjoleinpijnappels)

About the speaker
Siggie Vertommen works as a lecturer in gender and global health at the University of Amsterdam and as a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Research on Culture and Gender at Ghent University. She conducts feminist research into the global politics of (assisted) reproduction from Israel/Palestine to Georgia and Belgium.

Time: 12:00-13:30, 28 February

Venue: Faculteitsraadzaal, Blandijnberg 2, 9000, Ghent

To attend: The seminar is free to anyone interested but please register HERE so we know how many people to expect.

Find and sign the statement for Reproductive Justice for Palestine here: https://reprosist.org/…/resistance-is-fertile-endorse…/

In this book talk, Prof. Red Washburn will talk about their recently published book Irish Women’s Prison Writing: Mother Ireland’s Rebels, 1960s-2010s.  The sharing will be around 30 minutes, followed by discussions & QA sessions. The talk is free to anyone interested but please register HERE so we know how many people to expect. Below you can find more detailed information about the book and the author.

About the book

Irish Women’s Prison Writing: Mother Ireland’s Rebels, 1960s-2010s explores 50 years of Irishwomen’s prison writing, 1960s-2010s. It connects the work of women leaders and writers in the Six Counties of Ireland, especially during the Troubles. It analyzes political communiqués/ petitions, news coverage, prison files, personal letters, poetry and short prose, and memoirs. It highlights the personal correspondence, auto/biographical narratives, and poetry of the following key women: Bernadette McAliskey, Eileen Hickey, Mairéad Farrell, Síle Darragh, Ella O’Dwyer, Martina Anderson, Dolours Price, Marian McGlinchey, Ann and Eileen Gillespie, Roseleen Walsh, and Margaretta D’Arcy. It also includes interviews. This project builds on different fields and discourses to reimagine gender and genre as central to an interdisciplinary and intersectional prison archive. It repositions Irish women and their work in order to accurately archive social movements for civil rights and cultural productions about them – and this tradition is relevant even now during this moment of transatlantic solidarity with #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter Movement, including in Ireland, post-Easter Rising Centennial, as part of the big conversations happening now around the impacts of political repression and state attacks on social justice advocates and the harms of the carceral state.

About the speaker

Red Washburn (they/he) is Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Queens College of the City University of New York. They are Affiliate Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at the Graduate Center (CUNY). His book Irish Women’s Prison Writing: Mother Ireland’s Rebels, 1960s-2010s was published by Routledge. Red’s articles appear in Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and Journal of Lesbian Studies. Their essays are in several anthologies, including Theory and Praxis: Women’s and Gender Studies at Community Colleges, Introduction to Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies: Interdisciplinary and Intersectional Approaches, and Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource for the Transgender Community. They are the co-editor of Sinister Wisdom’s Dump Trump: Legacies of Resistance, 45 Years: A Tribute to Lesbian Herstory Archives, and Trans/Feminisms. Finishing Line Press published their poetry collections Crestview Tree Woman and Birch Philosopher X. They co-edited WSQ’s issue Nonbinary (forthcoming Fall 2023). He received an ACLS/ Mellon fellowship for their next project Nonbinary: Tr@ns-Forming Gender and Genre in Nonbin@ry Literature, Performance, and Visual Art.