Markets and Sexualities: A Workshop

25 February 2009 (2-5pm) @ University of Kent

To see the Programm click here

Papers:

• Bev Skeggs
  Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
  "Selling and telling oneself: the sensual spectacle of women’s labour"
  
• Ara Wilson
  Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Cultural Anthropology and Director of the Study of Sexualities, Duke University, USA
  "The Erotics of Creative Destruction: Capitalist Markets and Sexual Prospects"
  

Respondents are:

Jin Haritaworn, Fellow in Transnational Gender Studies, Gender Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, London
Ruth Fletcher, Keele University
Camila Bassi, Sheffield Hallam University

This workshop explores how markets shape and reshape sexualities, and vice versa. It takes as a starting point that there exist complex intersections between capitalism and kinship formations, market restructuring and the reconstruction of intimacy, and it aims to explore new ways of thinking about the mutual imbrication of sexuality and local, regional, national and transnational economies.
It asks:

• What are the sexualized implications of recent shifts in class relations?
• What types of intimate labour are made visible in contemporary mass culture?
• How do intimate attachments shape market relations in local, national, and transnational sites, and how, in turn, are markets shaped by intimacies?
• What forms of economy, production, and reproduction are circulating in contemporary formulations of capitalism, and how are these sexualized?  
• What intimate attachments animate the social movements struggling for alternative visions of globalization?

The workshop tackles these questions by providing a venue for the presentation and discussion of two new papers by two leading experts in the field, Prof. Bev Skeggs (Goldsmiths, author of Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable) and Prof. Ara Wilson (Duke, author of The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and Avon Ladies in The Global City). Their ethnographies of capitalism, gender, and sexuality have shaped research into intimacies and markets, and the papers they will present here aim to take the debates forward.

This inter-disciplinary, multi-method, transnational conversation promises to generate new insights and sparks: we look forward to seeing you there.

Venue: Keynes College, room KS23 (campus map)

This event is now fully booked and registration is therefore closed.