CentreLGS at Kent Seminar and Events Programme
Past Events 2008/2009
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Thursday 2 October 2008 (4:30pm)
Chris Beasley, University of Adelaide, Australia
Title: The Challenge of Pleasure: Let's talk about Sex in Gender Studies
Abstract: Men have a stake in ending gendered violence but this stake has not yet been widely embraced by men. Thus we must think carefully about our future strategic directions. Taking the case of sexual violence, I suggest that these directions involve re-thinking sexuality and sexual health by considering absences in the scholarly and policy literatures. While young people are constantly exhorted in popular media to be sexual and to undertake sex, young men have not been engaged by 'critical' analyses of sexuality. The critical literatures—which include writings in Gender/Sexuality studies and Preventive Health—aim to offer alternative understandings of heterosexuality which move beyond the imperatives of the popular media. Yet such critical approaches remain undeveloped, largely negative and/or focussed upon danger rather than considering heterosexuality in positive terms that might offer a substantive alternative and encourage young men in particular to embrace the aim of egalitarian sexual practices, including ending sexual violence.
Tensions in Gender/Sexuality scholarship, and Preventive Health sex education materials which draw upon that scholarship, produce significant absences with regard to analysis of heterosexuality and heterosexual subjects. In this context, existing research indicates that recognition of pleasure in sexual health has resulted in increased use of condoms by men and greater involvement of women in negotiation of sexual practices. Such research is not just relevant to prevention of disease, but has implications for our thinking about sexuality per se. Re-imagining the theoretical framing of Gender/Sexuality studies and Preventative Health to take account of pleasure in sexuality and sexual health is an important theoretical issue, which also has some very practical implications. Such a re-imagining suggests paying greater attention to the question of the libidinal body in political theorising, policy development and political practice.
EX8 (Eliot extension / KLS)
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Wednesday 8 October 2008 (5:00pm)
Gillian Harkins, University of Washington, English Department, USA
Title: Screening Pedophilia: The Woodsman, Mystic River, and the Space Between
Abstract: This paper explores the growing public interest in pedophilia and the serial predatory pedophile in the 1990s and 2000s United States. While the modern concept of pedophilia has been around since 1886, public fear of the predatory pedophile has been amplified in the past twenty years. The pedophile has emerged in popular visual culture as the vanishing point of a peculiarly recrafted public imagination. The elusive "passing" pedophile marks the horizon of televisual culture's capture of the real and the lure or bait offered as promise of a potentially salvific, fully tele-mediated world. Television shows such as "To Catch a Predator," "Law and Order," and "CSI" join a number of recent documentaries and films in their attempt to draw the mysterious vanishing pedophile into their lines of sight. This paper reads the amplification of pedophilia panic in relation to changing technologies of surveillance, militarization, and privatization in the still quasi-national U.S. public sphere. Reading the documentary "Capturing the Friedmans" alongside the films "Mystic River," "Mysterious Skin," and "The Woodsman," this paper argues that the pedophile figures a delimited zone of the "virtual" as the field of public interest, part of a changing technology of the public sphere and its residual field of vulnerable human embodiment.
GILLIAN NOTE: This paper makes specific claims about the U.S. "public sphere" to query the ongoing effort to nationalize pedophilia surveillance in the U.S. I intend this paper to specify its archive and query the scope/reach of its effects, including a discussion eventually of how the international circulation of pedophilia imagery operates. I do not intend to exceptionalize the U.S. case, since I believe very similar cases can be made about the U.K. and other regions.
CentreLGS common room
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Wednesday 15 October 2008 (5:00pm)
Anna Grear, Bristol Law School, UK
Title: ‘Exploring the Paradox of the Universal: Gender, Embodied Vulnerability and Human Rights’.
Abstract: A challenging paradox besets international human rights law. While the aspiration for universalism is potentially radically inclusory, the dominant abstract construction of the bearer of universal human rights has been revealed by a range of critical perspectives as profoundly exclusory. This paper will explore the possibility that a critique of the inherent disembodiment of abstractionism combined with a contrasting focus on embodied vulnerability as an ontological given of human existence could yield a radically inclusive re-conceptualisation of the human rights universal. With particular reference to the gender of the universal – a focal site of exclusion – a theoretical emphasis on embodied vulnerability that takes the ‘heretical’ body of the intersexual as a starting point seems to invoke a universal that moves beyond both the maleness criticised by feminist theorists and the binary invoked in response. It becomes possible to re-imagine the human rights universal as ‘multi’ and/or ‘omni’ gendered, introducing a non-essentialist spectrum-conception of sex and gender responsive to both variation and variability.
CentreLGS common room
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Thursday 23st October 2008 (1-2 pm)
Rosemary Hunter, Kent Law School, UK
INTELLECTUAL IN/DIRECTIONS
Rosemary Hunter will launch a new lunchtime seminar series, exploring how individual researchers craft, choose or are confronted with changing questions, projects, challenges and perspectives over time. The aim is to generate a better sense of each other's broader intellectual projects beyond the papers people are working on at any given time.
- what were the factors causing you to move from one topic/ project to another,
- why have you stopped working on a particular question/ issue
- are you working to a long-term plan or letting each project determine the next one
- how do you know if a topic/ field is no longer working for you intellectually
- does boredom play a role
- is your work politically motivated, and in what ways; has this changed
- how significant are intellectual fashions to what you do
- how much is and has your work been influenced by a particular theorist or framework
- have you come to reject or distance yourself from theorists you previously associated your work with, if so, why
CentreLGS common room
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Wednesday 12 November 2008 (4:00pm)
Jon Goldberg-Hiller, University of Hawai'i, USA: 'joint seminar with kls'
Title:Tarrying with the Real: What is the difference that marriage makes?
Since the American realist movement that has challenged legal formalism with social theory, the category of the “real” has continued to haunt the possibility and legitimacy of law. In the case of marriage, the foundations of its real institutional basis have been drawn into these philosophical, legal and political debates. Marriage law has been methodically reformed in light of emergent everyday social realities such as changing gender norms, access to employment, and other civil rights, while political tensions have also sought resolution through the transformation of marriage law, including the reassertion of its formalist character. This seminar explores aesthetic ideas of “the real” in light of the constitutional amendment now pending in California that is the first American attempt to repeal same-sex marriage rights in a jurisdiction that has legalized marriage of same-sex couples. What difference have these rights and these rites made in attempts to say “no” to, or to defend the law?
EX9 (Eliot extension, KLS)
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Friday 14 November 2008 (2:00pm)
Carl Stychin, University of Reading, UK
Title: 'Flying the Flag (for You)': The Politics of Citizenship and the Eurovision Song Contest
Plus music video by Didi Herman: "All I really want (is to see my shtetl)"
This paper provides a critical and interdisciplinary interrogation of the cultural phenomenon of the Eurovision Song Contest. In recent years, much attention has been paid to the construction of a European identity through the political and legal consolidation and expansion of the European Union. It remains unclear, however, whether the EU replicates or challenges (or both) the historical construction of the nation state by way of a stable national identity through which various ‘others’ are constructed. Critical scholars have become increasingly engaged with ‘Europe’, including the extent to which this very ambiguity of the European identity can be interpreted through the prism of queer theory. This paper can be situated within this theoretical framework. My focus, however, is the cultural spectacle of Eurovision, which has been interpreted both by academics and in popular culture as heavily inflected by a lesbian and gay sensibility characterised by artifice, excess, parody, glamour, irony and the problematisation of the binary of high (European)/low (Eurotrash) culture. But Eurovision also can be seen as a microcosm of the tensions which surround the widening and deepening of the European Union legal order. It is therefore an opportune moment to engage in a close reading of the policies and spectacles of the Eurovision Song Contest, which will be informed by critical readings of recent controversies and fabulous outfits.
GS5 (Grimond Seminar 5)
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Thursday 20th November 2008 (5:00pm)
Suzanna Walters, Chair Department of Gender Studies, Indiana University, USA
Title: Threat Level Lavender: gay marriage, citizenship, and the dilemmas of inclusion
If previous narratives of gay life were assiduously nasty, brutish and short then how are we to understand the current moment in which gay marriage, out gay celebrities and politicians, and even queer sensibilities have been - to some extent – mainstreamed and integrated? Are we witnessing “homo lite” and the commodification and taming of sexual radicalism or are these the signs that we might indeed be winning some part of the culture wars? Is integration always compromised assimilation? Must we be abject to be truly queer? Must we marry to be truly citizens? What narrative tropes emerge in an era in which visibility is the norm and media tokenism the route most taken? How is “gay identity” or even “gay community” construed in such a moment?
http://www.indiana.edu/~gender
DS14 (Darwin seminar room)
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Wednesday 26th November 2008 (5.00pm)
Bonnie Honig, Northwestern Law School, Chicago, USA
Title: "From Lamentation to Logos: Antigone's Offensive Speech"
In Sophocles' Antigone there is one speech that critics from Goethe to Jebb claim is inauthentic -- the speech in which Antigone late in the play introduces a new reason for her dissidence: the singularity of her brother Polynices. What she did for him, she would do for no other, certainly not for husband and children. Why? Because husbands and children can always be replaced but, with their parents dead, her brother is singularly irreplaceable.
Rather than doubt the authenticity of the speech, I take it to be a key to the play's meaning, and much else. I read the speech in detail alongside a similar story told in Herodotus' Histories, showing how the two texts read together call attention to sovereign efforts to control female lamentation.
Such lamentations challenge sovereign efforts to inaugurate economies of commensuration in which people and goods ARE in fact replaceable by other things, many of which a sovereign can provide.
The process of moving women from lamentation to logos is the sovereign project of education to reason. But, I argue by way of a reading of Homer's Iliad and Freud's essay on mourning and melancholy, in the end, it is not reason but rather the appetites that move us from lamentation to logos.
EX9 (Eliot extension, KLS)
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Wednesday 10th December 2008 (5pm)
Mariana Valverde, Professor of Criminology, University of Toronto, Canada
Title: "Seeing like a state, seeing like a city, and seeing like a neighbourhood:
jurisdiction, interlegality, and political theory"
Abstract: In recent years critical legal scholarship has usefully deployed geographers' work on scale to better understand the complex, open-ended process that Boa Santos' dubbed 'interlegality'. This paper seeks to go beyond the application of cartographical terms and metaphors to legal studies. Instead of turning to geography, it uses law's own resources to shed new light on questions of governance that are not reducible to 'scale'. Recent empirical research on the negotiation of conflicts in and by the city of Toronto demonstrates that the ancient legal assemblage of jurisdiction (plus the informal divisions of governmental labour that follow a jurisdictional logic) can be 'mined' to enrich our understanding of the 'interlegality' that is urban order -- especially if we interpret jurisdiction as the negotiation of *how* governance is done and not just of *who* does it.
EX9 (Eliot extension, KLS)
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Wednesday 21st January 2009 (5pm)
Elena Marchetti, Griffith University, Law School, Australia
Title: Sentencing Indigenous offenders of partner violence: A comparative analysis of Indigenous sentencing courts and specialist family violence courts
Abstract: One of the most common forms of violence in Indigenous communities is violence between intimate partners. Indigenous sentencing courts and specialist family violence courts (as well as mainstream courts) are used in Australia to sentence Indigenous partner violence offenders. I (together with Professor Kathleen Daly and Dr Jackie Huggins) have recently been awarded funding from the Australian Research Council to conduct research on finding (1) what unique contribution Indigenous sentencing courts make in addressing Indigenous partner violence that may not be present in specialist family violence courts; and (2) what each type of court process can learn from the other. The project is due to start in 2009 and will run for five years. My presentation will focus on aspects of this project. I will start by briefly outlining the different processes used by Indigenous sentencing and family violence courts in Australia, and the theoretical frameworks underpinning each type of specialist court. I will then discuss the debates which exist between and among feminist and Indigenous groups about whether informal justice processes, including Indigenous sentencing courts, are appropriate in responding to family, sexual, and partner violence. Although I will not be able to provide, at this point, any answers to the questions that typically surround the debates in this area, I will be seeking to clarify the issues raised and to discuss how the research project will be endeavouring to answer some of those key issues.
Venue: EX9 (Eliot extension / KLS)
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Tuesday 27th January 2009 (5pm)
Jamie Heckert, (CentreLGS Associate Fellow)
Title: 'carve out spaces, she said'
Thoughts on Nurturing Activist/Academic Connections
Abstract: In the decade since I first entered postgraduate training as a sociologist, I've encountered numerous voices expressing concern about the state of academia: some hollow with resignation, others passionate with fury, heartbreak, even terror. Still others were coolly abstracted in languages of ideological critique. Sometimes these stories were told as pitying or cautionary tales, a feeling sorry for those of us who were just starting out in our academic careers. Diverse in form, I hear in each expressions of suffering, desires for something different. While macro-level analyses of neo-liberalism, patriarchal bureaucracy and the state apparatus all offer invaluable reminders that such suffering is not simply an individual problem, I fear that focusing entirely on the big picture is potentially immobilising. In this talk, I aim to bring a more personal, intimate level of analysis, of emotion, still keeping in mind broader patterns of domination. In particular, I will speak from my experiences of activist experiments in carving out spaces within universities to do things differently. Interweaving autobiography, ethnography and snippets of theory, academic and otherwise, this talk will address wider concerns of identity, difference and emotional sustainability.
Venue: CentreLGS common room
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Wednesday 25 February 2009 (2-5pm)
Markets and Sexualities: A Workshop
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Thursday 26 February 2009 (10-12.00)
Title: "The government's recent welfare reform proposals" workshop
The purpose of the workshop is to discuss the Centre's recent consultation response and to consider future directions for members' work in this area. Bev Skeggs and Ara Wilson will be attending. Anyone who is interested in participating in future welfare reform-related activities is welcome to attend.
Venue: CentreLGS common room
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Tuesday 3rd March 2009 (1-2 pm)
Maria Drakopoulou, Kent Law School, UK
INTELLECTUAL IN/DIRECTIONS
This lunchtime seminar series explores how individual researchers craft, choose or are confronted with changing questions, projects, challenges and perspectives over time. The aim is to generate a better sense of each other's broader intellectual projects beyond the papers people are working on at any given time.
- what were the factors causing you to move from one topic/ project to another,
- why have you stopped working on a particular question/ issue
- are you working to a long-term plan or letting each project determine the next one
- how do you know if a topic/ field is no longer working for you intellectually
- does boredom play a role
- is your work politically motivated, and in what ways; has this changed
- how significant are intellectual fashions to what you do
- how much is and has your work been influenced by a particular theorist or framework
- have you come to reject or distance yourself from theorists you previously associated your work with, if so, why
Venue: CentreLGS common room
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Thursday 12th March (1-2pm)
Judy Walsh, Head of Equality Studies, UCD School of Social Justice, University College Dublin, Ireland.
Please join us for an informal lunchtime brown bag on Judy Walsh's work.She is currently visiting CentreLGS under the Marie Curie Transfer of Knowledge Programme and will be around until 6 April 2009.
Judy's research interests span various aspects of egalitarian theory and practice, socio-legal and feminist theory. For the past few years she has largely conducted policy oriented work, either commissioned by statutory equality and human rights bodies or with various NGOs. She is currently writing a monograph on the European Convention on Human Rights Act 2003 (for publication by Thomson Reuters in Spring 2009), as well devising a conceptual framework for the Participation and Practice of Rights Project (http://www.pprproject.org/).
She will talk for about 20 minutes, followed by discussion /questions about these two areas of work:
Human rights and equality law has of late nominally at least created spaces for norm construction by non-elites (e.g. via duties to consult (macro and micro); interventions by NGOs in legal proceedings). The major risk, of course, is that of pseudo-participation with attendant consultation fatigue and re-pathologisation of oppressed populations (as yet another set of 'experts' re-configures their problems). On the flip-side, some of the work I've done with NGOs in Northern Ireland and the Republic suggests that engagement in these forums can be a creative and transformative one, in particular effecting a shift in the discourse of rights from possessory accounts to relational understandings (not in a Third Way 'rights and responsibilities' sense!).
Equality jurisprudence: can this be reconfigured so that it problematises privileged class positions and identities (drawing on writing by e.g. Smith & Kimmel, Halley, and Cover).
A co-authored chapter from a book that's in press is attached. Judy explained it is coming from a particular literature base and replete with unanswered questions, so any feedback is welcome. No need to read this before the talk though, Judy is around for the rest of the term.
Venue: CentreLGS common room
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Wednesday 25 March 2009 (5pm)
Anne-Marie Fortier, Director Centre for Gender and Women's Studies, Lancaster University, UK
Title: Affective citizenship and the management of unease
This paper examines developments in British social policy and guidelines regarding community cohesion since 2007. Initially adopted in government policy following civil disturbances in the summer of 2001, 'community cohesion' combined visions of shared belonging with strategies of managing diversity. More recent versions, however, still place a strong emphasis on ideas of shared belonging but these are combined with strategies of managing migration and identity which are deployed in view of securing local communities against threats posed by extremism, deprivation, diversity and feelings of unease. After tracing the context in which the government initiated a review of its cohesion agenda, this paper examines how integration, proximity and affective citizenship come together under the banner of 'community cohesion', which has now become a national fantasy for a posthistorical future. The paper centres on how proximities are calibrated and designed into programmatic visions of 'integration and cohesion' that are founded on compulsory individuality and responsible, ethical citizenship - that is, where discerning citizens are those who are responsible 'users' of their 'culture', and who show the right affective attachment (or detachment) to their local community. In this respect, 'cohesion' is an ethical project imagined in the ambivalent spatial terms of obligations to and dangers of proximity - not only proximity to others, but crucially proximity to one's (culturalised) self.
More broadly, the paper argues that the cohesion agenda is an example of neo-liberal forms of governing that promote active, individual agency as the primary mechanism for overcoming social problems, and where subjectivization is itself a technique of governing aimed at changing communal relations and individual behaviours rather than reforming the very structural conditions that frame how people negotiate the 'risks' they may be exposed to.
Venue: EX9 (Eliot extension / KLS)
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Wednesday 8 April 2009 (12.00 - 1.30)
Joanne Conaghan, Kent Law School, UK
Title: Feminist Perspectives on Welfare Reform
A lunchtime think through engaging with Joanne Conaghan's recent policy response to the welfare reform White Paperfor the Foundation of Law, Justice and Society.
Joanne's draft policy paper you can download here.
Venue: CentreLGS common room
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Wednesday 13 May 2009 (5pm)
Aleardo Zanghellini, Division of Law Macquarie University Sydney, Australia
Title: 'Contextualising Islam's Objections to Same-Sex Sexuality'
Homosexuality has become one of the principal battlegrounds over which normative contemporary Western identity and its Muslim counterpart are being performatively enacted and consolidated. Current orthodoxies represent the West as benignly homophilic or (homo)sexually decadent and Islam as inherently homophobic or (hetero)sexually pure. Challenging these orthodoxies questions the radical irreducibility of Western and Muslim identities, and has the potential for undermining the polarity of evaluation that invests the Islam/West dichotomy. This paper targets one of these orthodoxies: in particular, the view that Islam objects to homosexuality per se. It begins by arguing that male same-sex anal sex, regardless of whether or not it was consensual, was, at the time of revelation and for centuries afterwards, socially intelligible as paradigmatic of practices of subordination. An awareness of this conceptualisation of same-sex anal sex generates a reading of relevant Qur'anic passages that better fits the Qur'anic text. According to this reading, the sin of the people of Lot recounted in the Qur'an, which constitutes the basis for arguing that Islam objects to homosexuality, was neither homosexuality broadly understood, nor necessarily rape, unlike what has been recently suggested. Rather, as the classical commentators insisted, it was male same-sex anal sex - in particular, anal sex as a practice of subordination. Even if this conceptualisation of anal sex helps us make sense of much of what the classical jurists said about homosexuality, and to show it in its best light, it does not follow that they always, or even frequently, drew the correct conclusions about same-sex sexuality. Indeed, the valence of consensual same-sex anal sex is more complex and variable now than it was in the past, quite apart from the fact that it is doubtful that it was ever entirely reducible to the idea that this sexual activity enacts relationships of mastership and subordination. Furthermore, it is impossible to be reasonably sure whether two people are engaging in same-sex penetrative anal intercourse as a practice of subordination or not. In light of these considerations, the fact that the Qur'an refrains from prescribing a pre-established punishment can be taken to indicate, in the specific case of male same-sex anal intercourse, that it is inappropriate to punish it by law at all.
Venue: EX9 (Eliot extension / KLS)
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Monday 18th May 2009 (5pm)
Anna Marie Smith, Cornell University, NY, USA
Title: Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach and Welfare Reform: Is “Paternafare” an “Undue Burden”?
This essay is a feminist normative political theory discussion of Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach to human rights and redistribution. After outlining Nussbaum’s theory and arguing that feminist advocates for poor women should prefer her approach to that of Rawls, I pursue a Nussbaum-inspired applied ethics analysis of American welfare law. I construct a hypothetical world in which there is an entitlement to a basic income under the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program. That entitlement is merely encumbered by two conditions: a means-test and the paternity identification and child support cooperation rule or “paternafare.” Would Nussbaum accept these conditions as morally permissible, or would she reject them as undue burdens on the entitlement to a basic income? I then draw up my own version of an undue burden test on the basis of Nussbaum’s theory. I explore whether the paternafare rule within this imaginary version of TANF would pass the capabilities-oriented undue burden test. Finally, I consider the means-test requirement from Nussbaum’s perspective. I argue that her non-fungibility principle can yield surprisingly robust redistributive results within specific historical conditions.
Venue: EX9 (Eliot extension / KLS)
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Wednesday 20 May 2009 (2-5pm)
Workshop on disability issues
Workshop with participants from the Oska Bright Film festival:
Mark Richardson, Artistic Director of Carousel & Oska Bright committee member
Matthew Hellett - learning disabled film maker and drag artist "Mrs Sparkle" & Oska Bright committee member
Simon Wilkinson from Junk TV, supporting the Oska Bright Festival
Venue: EX9 (Eliot extension / KLS)
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Wednesday 27th May 2009 (5pm)
Paul Amar, Asst. Prof in the Law and Society Program of UC Santa Barbara
“Operation Princess in Rio de Janeiro:Policing ‘Sex Trafficking,’
Strengthening Worker Citizenship, and the Urban Geopolitics of Security in Brazil”
This article develops new insights into the gendered insecurities of the neoliberal state in Latin America by exploring the militarization of public security in Rio de Janeiro 2003-2008 around campaigns to stop the “trafficking” of sex workers. Findings illuminate the intersection of three neoliberal governance logics:
1- a moralistic humanitarian-rescue agenda promoted by evangelical populists and police groups;
2- a juridical “law and rights” logic promoted by justice-sector actors and human-rights NGOs;
3- a worker-empowerment logic articulated by the governing Workers’ Party (PT) alongside social-justice movements, including that of police reformers and prostitutes’ rights groups. Gender and race analyses map the antagonisms between these three logics of neo-liberal governance, and how their incommensurabilities generate crisis in the arena of security policy. By exploring Brazil’s fraught efforts to attain the status of “human-security superpower” through these interventions this article challenges the view that the reordering of security politics in the Global South is inevitably linked to de-secularization, disempowerment, and militarization.
Venue: EX9 (Eliot extension / KLS)
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