Sander Gilman
Title: 'Whose Body is
it Any Way? Hermaphrodites, Gays, and Jews in N.
O. Body's Germany'
Abstract: I am going to speak about the complexity
of identity formation at the turn of the twentieth
century
in
a case of gender mis-assignment and its implications
for gender identity today.
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Rosemary Hennessy
Title: 'Feminized Labor in Deregulated Capitalism:
Jeans, Justice, and International Solidarity'
Abstract: The most recent phase
of capitalism has made the cost of life prohibitive.
Characterized
by the intensified deregulation of the state’s
role as a check on capital greed, neo-liberalism
is depriving human being and the natural world
of the time needed to nourish, replenish, and provide
the resources that support life. The concept of “bio-deregulation” addresses
this process and is a useful critical lever to
make visible the impact of neo-liberal capitalism
on the reproduction of nature and human being.
In considering the bio-deregulation of human life
under neo-liberalism, I will extend the concept
of bio-deregulation to the intimate relations that
bind the cultural value assigned to bodies in the
feminization of the workforce and the formation
of “what’s real.” I am especially
interested in how the uneven and contradictory
normative assimilation and abjection of feminized
and non-normative sexual identities across North
and South feature in this process. In order to
address the social relations that bind neo-liberal
encroachments on bodies and daily life in one-third
and two-thirds worlds, I will speak about some
of the ways bio-deregulation was implemented and
feminized bodies targeted as a site of struggle
in the legal and supra-legal aspects of an international
campaign in support of the organizing efforts of
Mexican garment workers assembling jeans for Levi
Strauss & Co. as well as the ways labor and
bodies are being re-narrated in a popular education
program for Mexican factory workers, some of them
former Lajat/Levi’s workers, who are becoming
labor legal advocates.
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Carol Smart
Title: 'Memory, Law and the Socio-politics
of Family Secrets'
Abstract: This paper will draw upon ideas I have been working
on for a new book entitled Personal Life, Intimacy
and Families. The book is an exploration of issues
to do with memory, biography, relatedness and emotions
and the chapter I shall draw on is specifically about
the workings of family secrets. In the paper I shall
slant my discussion towards the changing cultural
and social context for these sorts of secrets, the
changing content of them and the changing socially
constructed need to keep secrets. I shall relate
this to changing legal contexts and, in particular,
the cultural and legal move away from a permissive
attitude towards family secrets towards an insistence
on truth (particularly of genetic relationship).
I shall suggest that this is producing a climate
in which, paradoxically, we have less freedom to
keep secrets. I shall also explore the changes that
this produces in gender-power relationships since
one of the secrets which is no longer permitted is
to do with paternity.
