CentreLGS Conference: Theorising Intersectionality
Saturday 21 - Sunday 22 May 2005 @ Keele University
Abstracts:
To view participants abstracts, please click on the alphabetical
links below (abstracts are listed by surname), or download
the full list of abstracts in Microsoft Word format.
A - B
| C - D
| E - G
| H - J
| K | L
- P | Q
- R | S
| T - V
| W - Z
Alice Hearst
Smith College, USA
Paper Title: 'Children’s Cultural Identity:
Theorizing Intersectionality in Childhood'
Abstract: Children figure prominently
as both the present and future of historically marginalized
cultural groups seeking recognition and respect. In custody
disputes, adoption and foster care cases, concerns about
how to value culture and how to assign authority for inculcating
culture have become increasingly fraught. While the justice
claims of marginalized groups are compelling, developing
a coherent approach to undersanding the interests of the
community has proved to be endlessly complicated. Children
of marginalized groups are often in the diaspora; they
may belong to a number of different ethnic, cultural or
other ‘identity’ groups who may compete with
one another for access to the child. Likewise, disputes
often arise in custody cases when the parents disagree
upon the extent to which a child belongs to a particular
group or should be raised with a particular cultural identity.
The critical question is who ought to have the power to
define membership and identity.
Increasingly, the law is being called upon to police cultural
boundaries and determine cultural belonging. The law’s
approach is heavy handed; too often it ends up producing
cultural winners and losers. This paper examines issues
of intersectionality as they are implicated in the dispute
over cultural identity and children. It examines the fluidity
of cultural identity and explores some of the essential
ambiguities embedded in concepts of cultural belonging.
*******************
Cressida Heyes
University of Alberta, Canada
Paper Title: 'Changing race, changing sex: The
disanalogy in law, psychiatry, and feminist theory'
Abstract: Why are there ‘transsexuals’
but not ‘transracials’? Why is there an accepted
way to change sex, but not to change race? Behind these
questions is sometimes an implicit concern: doesn’t
the imagined example of ‘transracialism’ seem
politically troubling, and, if it is, doesn’t the
real phenomenon of transsexuality merit equivalent critique?
Or, conversely, if one accepts transsexuals as people
with legitimate demands (on medical resources or single-sex
spaces, for example), then would one not also be committed
to accepting the putative transracial in analogous ways?
In this paper I explain why, and in what sense, there
are transsexuals but no transracials. My answer draws
on the discursive histories of law, psychiatry, and feminist
theory, to show how ontologies of race and sex differ,
despite political commitments to ‘intersectional’
theorising. Understanding race and sex as products of
genealogies might provide, in Foucault’s words,
a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a field
of power through which we constitute ourselves as subjects
acting on others rather than a tacit, naturalised metaphysics
of identity. This conclusion offers answers to the ethical
and policy questions the disanalogy raises.
*******************
Donna Jeffery and Jennifer Nelson
University of Victoria and University of Toronto, Canada
Paper Title: Social work and cancer care: theorizing
intersectionality in professional practice and educational
policy
Abstract: This paper will present our
preliminary analysis of the conceptualizations of culture
and race that inform the everyday practices of white oncology
social workers. Our research examines how race, class,
gender and culture work together in constituting not only
the identity of the social worker, but his or her approach
to cases involving clients from racialized communities
in Canada. We situate such encounters within current dilemmas
in anti-racist social work education by critiquing the
predominance of "cultural difference" discourses.
We then discuss how a similar discourse permeates the
healthcare arena, meaning that systems of domination are
rarely considered. In conclusion, we point to key policy
implications, for social work practice and education,
of a paradigm shift from the 'cultural difference' model
to one based on a critical race approach that theorizes
interlocking systems of oppression.
*******************
Rebecca Johnson
University of Victoria, Canada
Paper Title: Theorizing the Intersection of Privilege
and Disadvantage: Reflections on Bars, Breasts, and Babies
Abstract: In her poem "Power",
drawing attention to the links between radium and ‘the
cracked and supperating skin’ of Marie Curie’s
fingers, Adrienne Rich suggests that we are too often
blind to the complicated relationship between power and
wound. Taking up her challenge, I focus on the intersection
of gender disadvantage with race, class and heterosexual
privilege. A focus on this fraught intersection can enable
us to identify complicated networks of negative and productive
power that sustain domesticity as a deeply gendered and
racialized disciplinary regime. It may also enable us
to better identify local sites of resistance to some of
the more toxic elements of our current socio-legal orders.
As a concrete context for this exploration, I link together
liquor licensing regulations that exclude children from
pubs, the body of the nursing mother, and depictions of
women (in the home and saloon) in the cinematic western.
