Kent University AgencyKent University company Kent Law SchoolCentreLGS home
Research Centre for Law Gender and Sexuality
Kent University
  login forum Useful Links Contact
genderUniversitylaw on sexualityequalityKent University UK
University of Kent
Canterbury University
kent
gender and the law
Kent University
law
Kent University
Research Centre for Law Gender and Sexuality
News and Events
Members
Research
Visitors
Centre Management
Training and Development
AHRC Kent University

CentreLGS at Kent Seminar and Events Programme

Past Events 2004/2005

Launch Event featuring Nina Yuval-Davis and Carl Stychin
Friday 24 September 2004 @ the University of Kent

**********************

Text and Terrain: Legal Studies in Gender and Sexuality
Saturday 25 September 2004 @ the University of Kent.

**********************

26 January 2005 5pm: Mark Liddiard (Kent) 'More sex please, we're British...' Museums and making histories of sexuality'

Abstract

Sexuality is a topic fundamental to human existence in every culture and through every epoch. It certainly pervades - even suffocates - almost all contemporary culture. Yet, simultaneously, it is striking that sexuality has been almost uniformly neglected by museums. Why?
In addressing this apparent conundrum, this paper draws upon original research to explore the processes of negotiation by which museums construct exhibitions and accounts of the past, and seeks to explain the traditional neglect of sexuality by museums in a number of ways. It also considers the nature of visitor reception in museums and notes that a combination of public interest in histories of sexuality; a broadening of social attitudes and a profusion of television programmes and books on the topic all suggest that museum engagement with the history of sexuality is long overdue. The paper concludes by predicting a transformation in the treatment of themes such as sexuality, as museums experience greater pressure for more inclusion of such perspectives from a variety of sources and for a variety of reasons. Ultimately, museum accounts of the past may never be the same again.

**********************

16 February 2005 4pm: Oonagh Reitman (LSE) 'Multiculturalism and Feminism'

**********************

18 February 2005 5:30pm: Mark Bell (University of Leicester) 'EU Equality Law: The Challenge of Diversity'
Open Lecture in KLT5. Preceeded by drinks from 5pm (KQSCR)

**********************

9 March 2005 2pm: Vikki Bell (Goldsmiths) 'Difference and Critique: After Performativity'

Abstract

Within feminist theory, the analysis of gender that revolves around a notion of ‘performativity’ and that has flourished over the past 15 years has begun to be questioned and even recast within a different tradition of thought. Within this alternative tradition, a door is opened for the return of a notion of ontology, with important consequences for critical thought; indeed, it has profound consequences for the very conception of difference and for the possibility of critique. The promise of performativity as a concept for feminist thought was always that although we cannot know the secret of who we are – because the secret is that there is no Secret – there is some point to theoretical analysis because there is some ethical and political hope in interrogating the lines of our constitution. With a shift of emphasis from Foucault and Derrida to the philosophies of Deleuze, at his most Bergsonian, and with a correlative shift in emphasis from subjectivities to affect, one arrives within a rather different theoretical terrain, one in which feminist critique is required to reassess its task. In this lecture the challenge of this shift is explored.

**********************

16 March 2005 2pm: Kate Bedford (Ohio) 'Considering sexualized development policy: Love, culture and "ethnodevelopment" in the World Bank'

Abstract

The World Bank – the world’s largest and most influential development institution – is trying to fix a problem embedded in its gender and development policy. Having prioritized the effort to get women into paid employment as the “cure all” for the development malaise, the institution must account for the work women already do - the unpaid labor of social reproduction that does not register in mainstream economics but which the Bank’s gender policymakers take very seriously. I explore the solutions to the tension between paid and unpaid labor enacted by Bank staff in a prominent Ecuadorian loan focused on rural development among indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian communities. Using fieldwork, interviews, and document analysis I argue that the Bank’s solution to the social reproduction problem embedded in this loan rests on an attempt to restructure heteronormativity, in order to produce partnerships wherein men love better and women act with (limited) rationality in the market place. I explore the explicit sexualized interventions undertaken by loan staff in this respect, particularly as they relate to the perceived interaction between sexuality, gender, and ethnicity. Specifically, Bank gender policymakers intervene to shore up certain normative models of partnership marked as culturally authentic while pathologizing communities with alternative arrangements of sexuality as hyper-oppressive to women. I consider what these policy solutions reveal about the role of sexuality in development initiatives, seeking to demonstrate how sexuality studies can provide insights of value to long-standing debates in feminist international political economy.

**********************

11 May 2005 3-5pm: Jon Goldberg-Hiller (University of Hawai'i) 'Feeble Echo of the Heart': Indigenous Struggles Against Legal Recognition in Hawai‘i.

Abstract

The study of public discourse regarding proposed federal recognition of Native Hawaiians reveals the contested postcolonial contours around which legal meaning is produced. We explore three predominant features of this discourse—place, temporality, and performance—and show how they are used by indigenous activists to rework dominant meanings of legal authority. We argue that far from being an exceptional event about an atypical place, this postcolonial dynamic shares many features with contemporary rights discourse as it increasingly moves in a transnational manner.

Sherene Razack (University of Toronto) Theorizing Racial Violence

**********************

18 May 2005 2pm: Carl Stychin (University of Reading) 'De-Meaning of Contract in the Civil Partnerships Debate'

**********************

24 May 2005 4pm: Elena Loizidou (Birkbeck) 'Double law'

Abstract

Butler has a dual understanding of law: institutional law and disciplinary or productive power (law). Her first understanding relates the institution of law and its agencies such as the courts, cases, statutes, and judges. Butler distrusts this and, more importantly, she identifies it as an institution that both abuses and subordinates those that conic before it. This position becomes evident in her book Excitable Speech (1997) where she analyses the ways in which hate speech has been articulated and politicised by feminist and race theories. Using her concept of performativity (via Austin and Derrida) she argues that speech does not originate in the person that speaks and thus we can really attribute responsibility to the one uttering hate speech. By this though she does not mean that perpetrators should be let free, but that the speaking subject is never in control of his/her speech, because speech pre-exists him/her. Hence she does not envisage a redressing or compensation to the injury via the courts. For Butler the only way to redress injurious speech is to rearticulate and re-appropriate injurious names in alternative ways. Good examples would he the re-appropriation of words such queer by gay, lesbian and transsexual people or the term nigger by black people and rap artists.
When it comes to the second understanding of law, which I identify as the normative practices and values (disciplinary power) that exist in a given society, Butler shows more faith. Following Michel Foucault, Butler demonstrates that disciplinary’ power produces subjects who in turn are able to resist their conditions of subjectification by exposing the limits of this production. She once more draws on her concept ‘performativity’ to demonstrate this. This offers an anti—foundational understanding of law: law and normative values come into being at the moment of their utterance and resistance.
These two different perspectives on law create a paradoxical position for Butler. In this paper I will explain this two approaches. Additionally I will address the need for Butler to hold onto this paradox. In other words I will he arguing that we can’t understand legal practices outside the operation of these two types of law. Law inevitably is the tension (resistance) between the institutional and the productive. Butler’s work makes this reading of law possible.

**********************

8 June 2005 4pm: Clare Hemmings (LSE) 'Time, space and translation: Bisexuality and western sexual discourse'

Abstract

In this paper I map some of the 'problems' that consideration of bisexuality poses for Western sexual discourse, through a focus on its location within narratives of sexual identity. I argue that while coming out narratives and queer theories of performativity appear to be at odds, they share an epistemological certainty that bisexuality is unfinished or inauthentic, that references a Freudian model of sexuality as derived from oppositional gender. Instead of calling for an assertion of bisexual identity in the face of bisexual representational failures, I consider what it might mean to translate failures of identity, rather than achievements, across disciplines and geographies.

************

Law school Kent University

In this section:
Events Calendar
News
- New Publications
Professional & Policy
Consultation Responses
- CentreLGS Responses
- Individual Responses
News Archive
Events Archive
Photo Gallery

Kent Universitylaw gender
UK Kent University
Kent University
gender law  
 Copyright © CLGS 2004 • Design: Artwyse

CentreLGS Home supported by the arts and humanities research board
sexuality and the law
Law School Kent University
Kent University
Kent University law department