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CentreLGS at the University of Kent - seminar series

Past Events 2005 - 2006

21 September 2005 ( 4:30pm)

Morag McDermont, University of Bristol '‘Making up’ tenants as governors: using Foucault’s perspective on the subject and power'

Abstract

This paper will present work-in-progress on a research project that is examining the role of tenant members of the boards of housing associations (not-for-profit organisations providing for people in housing need). Here I focus on the way that tenants who become board members are ‘made up’, and ‘make themselves up’ as governors.

I use Foucault’s work on subjectification – in particular his essay ‘The Subject and Power’ [1] – to consider how tenants become subjects of, and to power through three mechanisms: the objectification of the financial and legal professions who make tenants into risky subjects; objectification by the dividing practices, dividing the ‘dangerous’ anti-social tenant from the community-responsiblised tenant; and thirdly the ways in which tenants turn themselves into subjects through constructing themselves as moral – even moralising – governors.

I hope that the paper will stimulate discussion on the uses of Foucault’s work, inclduing his most recently published lectures on the ‘care of the self’, [2] in studying power relationships,

[1] Foucault, Michel (1983), ‘Afterword: The subject and power’ in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (eds) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (2nd ed), Chicago: The University of Chicago Press
[2] Foucault, M. (2005) The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981-1982, ed: F. Gros, trans: G. Burchell, New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

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29 September 2005 ( 4:30pm)

Nan Seuffert, a visiting fellow at CentreLGS, 'Nations, Sexual Citizenship, and Recognition of Same Sex Relationships in New Zealand'

Abstract

This seminar commences work in progress on stories of national identity, or imagined communities, in the law, policy and media debates on gay and lesbian marriage and the Civil Union Act 2004 in New Zealand. As imagined communities, nations are the stories that are told about collective identities, which also shape the stories that are available for individual identities. The inclusion of some identities occurs at the expense of the exclusion of others, and identifying particular national identities serves to repress other possibilities for both national and individual identities, as well as collective and individual differences within the nation. As imagined communities the identity stories of nations can be multiple and shifting, although one or some stories may be dominant, and may become entrenched. Stories of national identity circulate widely through news media, may be implicitly or explicitly contained in government policy documents and legislative debates, and may be reflected in legislation and cases. Cases brought as part of political action challenging prevailing stories of the nation, may result in decisions that renegotiate, shift or entrench stories of official nationalism. Law and policy reform are therefore integral to the creation and maintenance of both national identities, and possibilities for individual identities.

The seminar will offer some thoughts on stories of nation in New Zealand’s same sex marriage case, Quilter v Attorney-General, and the debate on same sex marriage and the Civil Union Act 2004. It will also pose some theoretical and practical questions for discussion.

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Thursday 13 October 2005 (4.30pm)

Brenna Bhandar Birkbeck School of Law, University of London

'The struggle for recognition, or recognition without struggle? Contrasts and conflicts in the theories of recognition of Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser.'

Abstract

The difference between the theories of recognition elaborated by these two feminist philosophers reflects one primary difference. The social philosophy of Nancy Fraser sits firmly within an analytical tradition that seeks to identify (and create) paradigms, models, and categories that can provide a theoretical basis (however abstract) for a practical politics of recognition. Nancy Fraser’s “status model of recognition” only makes reference to the concept of recognition’s Hegelian roots in the most superficial way. Judith Butler on the other hand, remains embedded in a Hegelian discourse of recognition in which desire, struggle, and various forms of psychic violence are inevitable dimensions of the struggle for recognition.
In this paper, I will explore the differences between these two theories of recognition with two purposes in mind. The first is to reflect on the profound difference that turning to the philosophical (i.e. Hegelian) foundations of the concept of recognition results in when it comes to thinking through and understanding the contours and temperament of the subject who struggles for recognition. (A good example of the difference it makes is found in Fraser and Butler’s respective discussions of same sex marriage). The second aim is to step back from the content of these theories of recognition and provoke a discussion about the recognition of feminist philosophy within academia. While Butler’s work on recognition is undoubtedly “philosophical” she is still moved to ask, in her recent work, the question of whether the “Other” of philosophy can speak. Reflecting on the place of philosophical work that is inspired by feminist, anti-racist and queer politics within legal academia, can we ask at what stage in the drama of recognition we currently find ourselves?

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Monday 17 October 2005 (4.30pm)

Raquel Platero, Universidad Complutensa de Madrid, Spain & Associate Fellow at CentreLGS from 4 to 28 October

'Are lesbians represented as women? Equality policies in Spain: looking for the intersectionalities on gender and sexual orientation'

Abstract

During 2005 Spain is presented by the international media as an evolving society that is able to approve gay marriage and has parity government. In this context of visibility of equality rights, the definition of lesbians as women -or the lack thereof - is relevant to show the coherence with these changes and the representation of citizenship for equal femocrats. Whether equality is presented as inclusive or exclusive with sexual orientation, it will delimit what equality is represented to be in the Spanish State Feminism.

While many countries are developing Equality and Diversity policies and institutions, Spanish policies remain mono-focussed on gender, disability, homosexuality, immigration, etc. For the last five to eight years most regions are developing equality policies which are progressively including different discriminations that affect women, such as ethnicity, age, capacities, religion, etc. Sexuality is one of the issues that remain reluctant to enter the equality agendas.

The evolution of Spanish equality policies have grown increasingly important since its creation in 1983. The analysis of the key tools for equality policies is applied to search for the intersectionality of gender and sexual orientation. I perform discourse analysis, showing the construction and representation of sexuality in gender equality policies and presenting the policy frame analysis defined by Rein, Schön and Verloo. In addition Bacchi´s representation theory is used to analyze the construction of non normative sexuality, pointing out (the inclusion of) lesbianism as the main problem. The text I will be presenting includes the construction of the ex/inclusion of lesbians in equality policies as a debate over citizenship. The discourses imbedded in the equality policy that is analyzed, present lesbians in the three frames. The article suggests that the future of equality policies may include the framing of the current equality policies, reluctant to perceive intersectional inequalities related to gender and sexuality.

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Monday 21 November 2005 (4pm)

Irus Braverman, University of Toronto, Canada

'Landscaping East Jerusalem: Mapping Out Illegalities and Narrating Everyday Resistances'

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Abstract

It is estimated that 85 percent of the Palestinians in East Jerusalem build their homes without permits. This practice has a radical effect on the everyday lives of these Palestinians as well as on Jerusalem’s urban landscape. My talk will focus on several bureaucratic technologies that produce this extensive volume of ‘illegality’ in the East Jerusalem space. Although the demolition of homes is the most spectacular spatial technology of illegality exercised by the Israeli bureaucracy in East Jerusalem, it is also important to expose some of illegality’s more mundane and routine technologies such as mapping, filing and arbitrariness. In this context, I will pay particular attention to the bureaucratic ordering of Nature, namely the use of ‘nature-talk’ and greenspace techniques for the purpose of neutralizing and concealing ideological mechanisms of spatial control. I will also introduce the notion of spatial resistance and explore whether the act of illegal construction by Palestinians in East Jerusalem can or should be framed as such. By providing a nuanced understanding of the relations between bureaucrats and subjects, my talk will offer a glimpse into how power is landscaped in East Jerusalem.

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'How To...' Workshop:

Improve presenting your research and answering questions at conferences

23 November 2005 ( 3-5pm)

This is the first in a series of 'how to' workshops - all PG and academic colleagues welcome. The workshop will include performances of how not to do it by Joanne Conaghan and Didi Herman.

People interested in coming should contact Anisa (a.j.de-jong@kent.ac.uk) so we can plan numbers etc.

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Wednesday 30 November 2005 (12.30 –13.30pm)

Work-in-Progress Seminar: Emily Haslam, Kent Law School

Topic: Non-Governmental war Crime Tribunals

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5 December 2005 (5.30-7.00 p.m.)

Seminar: "What is a woman and does it matter?"

CentreLGS Common Room, Eliot College, University of Kent

Refreshments provided

Short contributions from Jean Fraser, Maria Drakopoulou, and Emily Grabham and discussion:

  • can we treat the categories of 'woman' and 'man' as meaningful? Do the unconventional lives of some men and women disrupt the meaningfulness and coherence of gender?
  • is gender socially constructed? Is its erasure a future possibility?
  • can we refuse to be women if society continues to treat us as such?
  • are the cultural, economic, social and psychic processes of gender in tune with each other? Have cultural and bodily distinctions been asserted as the economic ones lose their force? have they lost their force?
  • can one become a woman later in life: what is required for this to convincingly take place?
  • can one both be and not be a woman?
  • have lesbians now become women? Do heterosexual females remain women?
  • do the lives of intersex people demonstrate the optional character of gender as a repertoire of cultural choices or do they demsonstrate the reverse?

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Wednesday 7 December 2005 (4:30pm)

Judith Halberstam, Professor of English at the University of Southern California
http://www.uscenglish.com/faculty.cfm?action=detail&faculty_id=40

'Notes on Failure'

Abstract

The models of success and failure that we use nowadays to determine social progress, individual achievement and political effectivity all derive in some measure from capitalist formulations of success and from economic notions of gain, profit, advantage and benefit. In order to make failure productive then, we need to link failure to a critique of capitalism and to a politics of negativity. Queer studies offer us one method for imagining, not some fantasy of an elsewhere but, existing alternatives to hegemonic systems. What Gramsci terms “common-sense,” depends heavily upon the production of norms and so the critique of dominant forms of common-sense is also, in some sense, a critique of norms. Heteronormative common-sense leads to the equation of success with advancement, capital accumulation, family, ethical conduct, hope, and so on. Other subordinate, queer or counter-hegemonic modes of common-sense lead to the association of failure with non-conformity, anti-capitalist practices, non-reproductive life styles, negativity, critique.

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Wednesday 25 January 2006 (13.30 –14.30pm)
(note: later than usual!)

Work-in-Progress Seminar: Suhraiya Jivraj, Associate Fellow at CentreLGS from 31 October to 24 February

“Queer makings of Muslim heros and demons: Gendered and race-ed resistance”

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Thursday 23 February 2006 (4 pm)

Emily Grabham (KLS): Work-in-Progress: "Sex / Chorus"

Abstract

‘If we know already that she dies, why doesn’t she die?’
(Antinous in Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona Furiosa)

This paper contributes to an ongoing debate at the intersection of feminist theory and work on intersexuality: whether, and to what extent, it is helpful anymore to theorise intersexuality in terms of ‘unintelligibility’. My initial conclusion, along with theorists such as Iain Morland, is that unintelligibility needs to be unpacked in order to excavate how it fits into gender theory and into the ongoing dynamics between intersexed individuals, their families and, most importantly, the medical professionals who ‘specialise’ in intersex ‘cases’. In the following analysis, I hope to examine these dynamics more closely by using the metaphor of ‘the chorus’. In particular, ‘the chorus’ may be useful for thinking about (1) the somatic effects of collective structures (such as families, teams of specialists) on the bodies of intersexed people, (2) the temporalities of intersex ‘treatments’, and (3) the implications for intersexed people of the ‘multiple possibilities’ that are perceived within their bodies at birth and beyond.

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Wednesday 1 March 2006 (1 - 2 pm)

Lunchtime discussion: Radical child-raising: is it still possible in Britain today?

Issues we might cover include:
extended families, living communally, feminist parenting, lesbian and gay families, beyond commodification, multiple parents, the self-regulated child, collective child-care, raising non-competitively

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Thursday 2 March 2006 (3pm)

Mary Ewert (Keele Law School): “Privacy Rights, the Adolescent Woman, and
Jean L. Cohen’s ‘Regulating Intimacy: A New Legal Paradigm’”

Abstract

My focus in this paper is a close reading of Jean Cohen’s application of the reflexive/procedural legal paradigm to the regulation of intimacy. I consider whether Cohen’s reworking of the regulation of intimacy supports reproductive autonomy for adolescent women, particularly in light of the Title X case study that forms part of my research project. I am drawn to Cohen’s engagement with privacy rights because privacy arguments provide a familiar base for grassroots activists who may be unaware of the theoretical debates around privacy. Challenges to confidential adolescent access to reproductive healthcare are ongoing, and from an activist perspective holding the line on access is an immediate concern. This attempt to locate reproductive autonomy for adolescent women under an updated rubric of privacy is in no way dismissive of the potential for more more radical reworkings of intimacy.

Julie McCandless (Keele Law School): “The meaning of Father”

Abstract

Regulating paternity has been a persistent legal angst of most Western legal systems. This paper seeks to analyse discourses that emerge from the legal regulation of fatherhood under section 28 of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (HFEA) and a selection of related case law. [1] Entitled “Meaning of Father”, section 28 delineates who is to be considered the legal father of a child when fertility services have been used to bring about its conception. It is a dense definition, which, as Sally Sheldon contends,

“…suggests an attempt to think through the various complex possibilities raised by the reproductive technologies and, in each potential factual situation, to allocate fatherhood status in such a way as to most clearly approximate the nuclear family.” [2]

In the paper I aim to build upon this argument, and have selected my cases on the basis that their facts present a situational challenge to the nuclear family premise. I aim to develop the nuclear family argument by amplifying its gendered dynamics. So while the nuclear family ‘challenge’ of these cases will be examined, what this case law discloses about the qualities law perceives to be desirable for fatherhood will be of equal interest. The central argument of the paper will be that while the cases examined present as desirable a more familial or social concept of fatherhood, as compared to how fatherhood has traditionally been constructed by law, the legal and regulatory discourses still remain rooted in a connected gender network of the traditional family and prescribed sex/gender-based roles. This results in old patriarchal notions being reinvented under new guises, such as discourses that emphasize the importance of genetic or identity heritage. As has been consistent throughout history, discourses relating to social or familial fatherhood are submerged by discourses that reflect the more traditional qualities of fatherhood, and therefore, unlike motherhood, active care is not seen as fatherhood’s most desirable or important quality. I argue that this contributes to the persistence of gender-based assumptions about fathers and fatherhood, detrimentally (or at least inflexibly) affecting how individual cases are dealt with by the courts, and more broadly, limiting parental choices and activities for men, and indeed women.

The paper will be delivered in four sections. In the first, the framework of the provision and its connection the nuclear family model will be explored. At this stage, terminology will also be addressed by relating a definitional understanding of ‘nuclear family’ to the concept of the ‘sexual family’ as developed by Martha Fineman. The second section will look briefly at fatherhood discourses, and will be a threefold exercise that outlines the (dominant) traditional discourses as they were previously understood; more recent concepts of social/familial fatherhood; and newer discourses that reinforce fatherhood as a ‘symbolic’ rather than an ‘active’ institution. In section three I will address how the courts have dealt with the challenges that these four cases have presented, and explore how they have used the given legislative framework. For example, have they been able to use the legislation creatively to deliver reasoned argument; what legal fictions have been used to sustain the legislation; what new discursive opportunities have the cases presented in the context of changing perceptions of fatherhood? The final section then will address the specific discourses that emerge in the selected cases, in an attempt to determine if social fatherhood is being constructed in the same way as (social) motherhood. That is, is fatherhood being understood with a construct of care at its centre, or is an alternative construct of perhaps (symbolic) stability or responsibility being deemed the most desirable quality of a ‘good father’?

[1] R v ex parte Blood [1996] 3 WLR 1176 (HC), 2 All ER 687 (CA); X, Y and Z v the UK [1997] 24 ECHR 143; The Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS trust v Mr A, Mrs A and Others [2003]EWHC 259 (QBD); In Re D (A Child Appearing by Her Guardian ad Litem) (Respondent) [2005] UKHL 33.
[2] Sheldon, S., ‘Reproductive Technologies and the Legal Determination of Fatherhood’ 13(1) Feminist Legal Studies 349-362 (2005), p.354 [my emphasis].

(Note: both Mary and Julie are visiting the Centre from Mon 27 Feb – Sat 4 March)

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Thursday 9 March 2006 (4 pm)

Bela Chatterjee (Lancaster Law School) : 'New Digital Divides? e-learning and equality'

Abstract

This paper investigates the question of whether virtual learning environments ('VLEs') facilitate or encourage a level playing field in relation to gender equality in learning. My knowledge of the literature in gender and cyberstudies has suggested that there are certain gendered 'digital divides' in relation to new information technology, and I seek to combine this academic background with my teaching interests and question to what extent the use of VLEs in teaching and learning facilitate or inhibit gendered voices in the 'virtual' classroom. I seek to question whether the introduction of new technologies in teaching and learning has created a more egalitarian learning space particularly in relation to gender, a question that remains largely unasked in the current literature. In order to ground and contextualise this hypothesis, I have chosen to draw upon some primary data from the VLE on my new course, Sexualities and the Law, which was designed around CILTHE (Certificate in Learning and teaching in Higher Education) core principles. My preliminary investigations suggest that whilst female students are embracing digital forums, male students appear to be either silent, or absent.

(Bela is visiting the Centre from Tues 7 - Fri 10 March)

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Wednesday 15 March 2006 (12.30 -1.30 pm)

Fabienne Jung (SSPSSR, Kent): Work-in-Progress Seminar: ‘Ways Out. Queer Narratives of Femininity’

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Wednesday 22 March 2006 (12.30 – 1.30 pm)

Sophie Vigneron (KLS): Work-in-Progress Seminar: “The illicit trade of cultural property”

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Thursday 4 May 2006 (3.00 – 5.30 pm)
Eliot Extension (Kent Law School) seminar room EX9 (first floor)

Workshop: ‘Sexual Politics in the Global South’

Prabha Kotiswaran "Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labour and other stories of the Lumpen Proletariat"

Brinda Bose "Cities, Sexualities and Contemporary Indian Cinema"

Abstract

This paper will attempt to lay out the paradigms for an investigation of a gendered urban consciousness in an emergent sub-genre of contemporary Indian cinema that straddles the earlier distinct categories of ‘art’ and ‘popular’ and deploys English as a signifier of its post/modernity. India in the twentieth century has been seen as inspired by ‘Western’ notions of modernity/modernizing/modernism, and this has been linked to a consistent focus on urban middle class gender issues in the history and culture of representation. Does ‘English’, in its literal and metaphorical manifestations, determine a ‘gaze’ on the metropolis, and is the metropolitan ‘gaze’, by extension, then responsible for new and radical interventions in gender/sexual politics through the conduit of an alternative cinema? If ‘English’, connoting westernization, must always necessarily remain an ‘Other’ in postcolonial India, does its deployment in cinema, a form that embodies a mediated national consciousness, gesture at the essential fragmentariness of the postcolonial condition? And if so, can it then be said that our ‘habitations of modernity’, to use Dipesh Chakrabarty’s eloquent term, are in the process of being interrogated by emergent postmodernities, in which urban and sexual displacements are symptomatic of the interrogation itself? I will explore these questions in the context of some representative contemporary Indian cinema.

Rina Ramdev "The new Sofa -bed: Arundhati Roy and Githa Hariharan as Writer-Activists"

Abstract

Writing to challenge existing power structures through their writings and engagement with causes, Arundhati Roy and Githa Hariharan articulate a new liberatory paradigm one that goes beyond the binaries of writer and activist, aesthetic and utilitarian. In this vocal and visible commitment they form a small minority within the community of contemporary Indian writers. They are seen as the new exotic, or as Roy says the “new sofa-beds” writer-activists, generating much media hype and some debate about the roles played by women, writers and predictably women as writers in some plainly gendered readings of their positions.

Beyond these issues it would be interesting to see how they are positioned within the causes that they engage with. Can their oppositional struggles be seen as activist or are these only interventionist with short term expiry certificates, precluding any intensive involvement? Further, in this are they aligning themselves with the feminist project and the women’s movement in India, or are they affiliating themselves to small, local concerns and agendas thereby favoring the politics of the new social movements? These are some of the many questions that I hope my presentation will raise and explore.

Ara Wilson "Mapping queer sexuality in the Global South"

Abstract

This talk maps a new direction for discussing queer sexuality in the non-West or Global South. Most conversations about sexual modernity in the non-European world have by and large rotated on the relation to Western sexual systems: to what extent are queer identities a Western export? Recent work on diasporic and post-colonial sexuality has complicated understandings of queer identities and politics in the global north. My paper takes this post-colonial approach in a new direction by investigating how flows within the non-Western world might provide conditions for sexual modernity. Part of a book project called Sexual Latitudes: The Erotic Politics of Globalization, the talk maps key cultural, economic, and political circuits in the non-Western world that affect same-sex and queer sexuality particularly in Southeast Asia, for example, proposing that the large flows of capital investment and business travel within the region create spaces for elite same-sex leisure. The examples illustrate a method to "provincialize Europe" in analyzing global queer lives.

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Tuesday 9 May 2006 (4pm)

Les Moran (Birkbeck Law School): ‘Judicial diversity and the challenge of sexual orientation: What can be learned from the South African experience?’

Abstract

Diversity has been a central theme of recent UK reform debates focusing upon the judiciary. The Constitutional Reform Act of 2005, introduces a new judicial appointments mechanism and imposes a statutory duty (s. 64) to encourage diversity in the selection and appointment of judges. To date the primary diversity focus of these debates has been gender and race. This reflects the dominance of gender and race in existing official and scholarly quantitative and qualitative research on the judiciary and the legal profession. Sexual orientation has been part of the diversity debates. While sexual orientation is not specific to lesbians and gay men they are most likely to experience sexual orientation discrimination. A recurring theme within the reform debates has been lack of data on sexual orientation. No scholarly research has been undertaken to examine this aspect of diversity in the judiciary. Research on sexual orientation and judicial diversity is urgently needed to facilitate and develop policy and good practice but the invisibility of judges from sexual minorities makes it difficult to develop data. This project seeks to undertake the first research study on sexual orientation as an aspect of judicial diversity.

Why South Africa? South Africa offers a unique context in which to undertake this research. The South African Constitution is the first to have an equality provision that includes sexual orientation. Several lawyers who are known to be lesbians and gay men have been appointed to senior judicial positions. To date in the UK only one lawyer who is an ‘out’ gay man has been appointed as a judge. Sexual orientation has been an explicit issue in some South African appointments and promotions, for example in Edwin Cameron’s application for a position in the Constitutional Court and Justice Anna Marie de Vos’s application for promotion in October 2005. Furthermore the profile of lesbian and gay judges has been high because of successful human rights litigation brought by two judges, on adoption rights (de Vos v Minister for Welfare) and judicial pensions (Satchwell, President of South Africa). Sexual orientation and the judiciary has also been a focus of popular interest in the mass media. Comparative research has been feature of the recent reform debates in England and Wales. South Africa has been identified as offering a useful comparison because of its strong Constitutional commitment to human rights, a Constitutional requirement to promote judicial diversity in terms of race and gender, an independent appointments mechanism designed to promote greater openness, accountability and judicial independence, and the openness and public scrutiny of that appointments process. During the operation of the new appointments mechanism (over 10 years) the composition of the judiciary has undergone significant change with the addition of a many black and minority ethnic judges several of whom are women. Further change continues to be demanded. Promoting diversity in the context of the transformation of South Africa has also generated a rigorous official and public debate about the nature of key concepts and the interrelationship between them in particular objectives of judicial diversity and the meaning and practice of appointment based upon merit, the politics and role of the judiciary and judicial independence. This paper is based upon some preliminary interviews with members of the judiciary in South Africa.

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Thursday 11 May 2006 (3.00 - 5.30 pm)
Eliot Extension (Kent Law School) seminar room EX9 (first floor)

Workshop: ‘Revisiting Intersectionality’

Nancy Ehrenreich “Intersectionality Interrogated”

Joanne Conaghan 'Intersectionality and UK policy developments in the Equality Field'

Qudsia Mirza “Intersectionality, Multiculturalism and Religious Identities”

View details of other CentreLGS@Kent Events:

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Tuesday 16 May 2006 (4pm)

Wendy Brown (Berkeley): ‘Sovereign Hesitations: Democracy in Derrida's Rogues.’

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Tuesday 30 May 2006 (4 pm)

Iain Morland (Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies):
‘Why Five Sexes Are Not Enough’

Abstract

Do intersexed individuals—those of us born with ‘ambiguous’ sexual characteristics—have a political obligation to identify as members of a third, or even a fourth or fifth, sex? It would seem that the unwilling recipients of medical treatment for bodies that cannot be easily described as either male or female must decide whether to identify as intersexed, even after the body parts that medicine calls intersexed have been removed in childhood. In other words, only by refusing to identify as female or male can a post-surgical individual counter surgery’s claim to make a patient readily determinable as either one sex or the other.
My starting point in this paper will be that the medical management of intersexuality, when experienced by patients as morally and physically injurious, creates as one of its negative effects the suffocating position of apparently needing either to align one’s identity with one’s sexual politics (by identifying as intersexed), or conversely to relinquish the political critique of intersex medicine by docilely passing as female or male.
To dismantle this unreasonable opposition, I want to follow Kate Bornstein in advocating ‘the abandonment of politicized identities in favor of the politics of values’. I’ll argue that a queer ‘politics of values’ offers a better way of understanding the identities claimed by individuals with atypical genitals—both those of us who have received surgery, and those who have not. I will argue that the sex that one claims as an identity is a matter of the politics of values, not of a person’s descriptively apprehensible anatomy, or of one’s identity as a description of one’s anatomy.

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Thursday 1 June 2006 (4pm)

Gillian Calder (University of Victoria, Canada): 'The Personal is Economic: Unearthing the Rhetoric of Choice in the Canadian Maternity and Parental Leave Debates'

Abstract

This paper looks at a recent series of decisions in Canadian law that have put the constitutionality of maternity and parental leave before the courts. Most of the decisions have engaged in a formal equality framework with the issue of whether or not the regime as presently delivered is equality-enhancing. However, the first decision on the regime to reach the Supreme Court of Canada was not asked to discuss the equality aspects of this benefits regime, but instead to determine who has proper jurisdiction over this matter. And, even more surprisingly the question was cast in language that evoked the rhetoric of choice, whether these benefits should be treated differently from other forms of benefits given the ‘choice’ made by employed parents to have children. This paper aims to examine how the use of the rhetoric of choice has shifted the focus of the debate away from what is in the best interests of women negotiating the tensions of their productive and reproductive lives, and toward a neoliberal understanding of work.

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Wednesday 7 June 2006 (4pm)

Kalpana Kannabiran (NALSAR, University of Law, India): 'Marriage, conjugality and relationship in south India: A history of early twentieth century debates on devadasi abolition'

Abstract

This paper will examine the large intersecting economies of the state, land, reform, caste, culture, morality and conjugality in a period of transition. Through a feminist analysis of judicial discourse, constructions of gender and family, and the politics of citizenship that contain the complex interconnections between abolition, anti abolition, self respect, nationalism and the performing arts, the paper will explore the history of devadasi abolition (or the dedication of women to temples) in all its complexity.

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Tuesday 20 June 2006 (4 pm)

Judith Halberstam (University of Southern California, USA): 'Transgender Identity in a Global Frame'

Abstract

In my remarks today, by way of an attempt to provoke discussion, I want to discuss the subtle discursive shifts which have made transgenderism into simultaneously a mark of the definitional cleaving of homosexuality from gender variance, a trendy and stylistic shift from gender androgyny within lesbian communities to gender variance within gender-queer communities, a sign of an internal split within feminism between the stabilization of the category of woman and the undermining of the coherence of the category within queer theory. At the same time, transgenderism has been installed within a “global gay” system as part of the hegemony of US taxonomies – the addition of “T” to the acronym “LGBT” allows for the neat division and explanation of a very wide range of translocal phenomena in terms of the US model. So, how are we to understand and explain the impact of transgenderism upon not only traditional gendering but also upon queer communities and even on the ebb and flow of sexual and gender definition globally?

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Tuesday 27 June 2006 (4pm)

Kim Brooks (University of British Columbia, Canada): 'Does Feminist Theory Speak to International Income Redistribution by the State?'

Abstract

One of the most urgent questions being debated among legal and other scholars in many areas of law and political economy over the past decade is whether nation states will be able to maintain the capacity to impose regulatory frameworks on the economic lives of their citizens in the face of the pressures created by "globalization". Scholars have raised concerns that, left unchecked, globalization will lead to a "race to the bottom." The predicted result is that the allocation and distribution of economic resources will be determined only by the free play of market forces.

This prediction has enormous implications for the redistributive project undertaken by feminist scholars and critical race theorists. On a domestic level, it means that redistributive schemes, like public pensions, corporate income taxes, and social assistance regimes have been left vulnerable to challenges that the imposition of redistributive regulation is no longer viable in the face of increased international competition. In Canada, feminists have witnessed the state's abandonment of its redistributive commitments on a number of levels - the state has eroded or eradicated altogether national standards in social assistance provision, reduced universal access to health care, and abandoned its commitment to close-to-free secondary education. The state justified these changes on the perceived need for smaller, more competitive states, with less need for revenue, in the face of international pressures to cut costs. The courts have similarly failed to safeguard a dignified level of assistance for low-income Canadians under our constitutional guarantees, and have used pressures on government fiscal resources as a justification for failing to provide basic redistributive programs to women and other economically vulnerable groups.

Internationally, the problem is perhaps even more significant. It must be obvious that one of the most urgent problems facing the world is the huge divide in living standards and every other indicia of human development that exists between developed and developing countries. As an indication of how seriously this problem is now being taken in at least some quarters, in his 2001 Report of the Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, reported on the decision to focus the UN's Millennium Declaration goals on development and poverty eradication. When the UN member states met in New York from September 14 - 16 2005, they confirmed what was suspected - little progress has been made in the last five years toward the Millennium goals, and significant new avenues for achieving the Millennium goals will need to be explored if they are to be met.

I am currently engaged in a large project exploring the question of whether tax treaties might provide one avenue for governments to engage in the redistribution of income internationally. In that research, I have been struck by how little feminist research has been done on the use of tax mechanisms as an international redistributive tool. (In fact, to date I have found nothing from that perspective.) Instead, some international law scholars have theorized about the problem of income and wealth inequality for women, and tax scholars have theorized about domestic redistributive goals that would promote women's equality.

In this paper, I propose to explore what feminist and critical race theory has to say about the changing role of the state in the international redistribution of income in the face of increased internationalization and globalization. Does a feminilonial approach suggest that some methods of redistribution are more just than others?

Can the international tax treaty network provide a method to promote greater distributional equality between nations and the "citizens" of those nations? How does a feminist, anti-colonial approach confront difficult questions of nation-actors in the design of international redistributive mechanisms?

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Wednesday 28 June 2006 (3-5 pm)

SEMINAR: "Cultural Studies: Theories and Methods"

What is Cultural Studies? What is the history of the development of cultural studies and what is its future in a changing university. Shifts in technology in the last thirty years have engendered widespread discussions about the meaning of culture in the age of digital technology. In this seminar, we will examine basic methods, theories and activities in Cultural Studies.

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