University of Westminster CentreLGS Members
Past Events 2008/2009
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Tuesday 28th October 2008 ( 6.15-8.30pm)
FEMINISM WITH FIZZ! a series of conversations on ‘feminism in practice’
FEMINISM, Law and Health
Dr Ruth Cane, School of Law, Keele University, on Law, Motherhood and Mental Health
Corrine Singer, Consultant Solicitor, Scott Moncrieff Harbour & Sinclair, mental health law practitioner and part time president of mental health tribunals and
Robin McKenzie, Senior Lecturer, University of Kent on Assisted Dying and the Ethic of Care
Portland Hall, University of Westminster, School of Law, 4 Little Titchfield Street, London W1
Rsvp essential: Harriet Samuels H.Samuels@westminster.ac.uk
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Wednesday 15th October 2008 (1:00pm)
Chris Beasley, University of Adelaide, Australia
Title: Re-thinking Hegemonic Masculinity in Global Politics
Abstract: Our understanding of power relations in domestic and global setting is crucially informed by analyses of the gendered character of contemporary societies and global politics. ‘Hegemonic masculinity’ is a crucial concept in such analyses and indeed is ubiquitously employed in studies of masculinity per se. However, this concept has also been the subject of debate. This paper focuses upon this term, and considers possible problems within it, in order to offer some directions for the as yet relatively undeveloped study of masculinities in a globalising world. The paper asserts that, while the concept remains useful, modifications suggested by its originator, R. W. Connell, do not go far enough.
The pervasively used terminology of hegemonic masculinity remains a rather blunt instrument. It is currently used in Masculinity, Feminist and International Studies to stand in for a singular monolithic masculinity, a global hegemonic form ‘on a world scale’ (Connell, 2000) and is understood to refer to ‘transnational business masculinity’, to an elite group of socially dominant men. However, this conceptualisation offers an account of globalisation as a singular and one-way, top-down process in which the political legitimating function of hegemonic masculinity is largely eclipsed by an emphasis on economic power.
Re-thinking the term hegemonic masculinity is necessary to produce a more nuanced understanding of privileged legitimating conceptions of manhood, and of relations between different conceptions of masculinities in the global/national nexus. Such an analysis provides a means to re-think how gendered global politics, how (gendered) globalization may be conceived.
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Wednesday 22nd October 2008 ( 2:00-4:30pm)
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.
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Tuesday 20th January 2009 (6.15-8.45pm)
FEMINISM WITH FIZZ! -FEMINISM, Law and Policy
Do Women policy makers and politicians make a difference?
A conversation with
Professor Judith Squires, Professor of Political Theory, University of Bristol
Andrea Murray, Director of Policy, Equality and Human Rights Commission
Speaker from Emily’s List TBC
Venue: University of Westminster, Portland Hall, School of Law, 4 Little Titchfield Street, London W1 (Oxford Circus tube)
All welcome but RSVP essential. RSVP: H.Samuels@westminster.ac.uk
