Gender Studies MA

Layout of submission 6 logs Extended log Group presentation Log presentation WG3_Eckersley_Portfolio Ethnography Participant observation (Engaging with the research) Non-participant observation Interviews Focus groups Surveys Data analysis - in paperwork cultures (e.g. CDA) Positivistic ideal ethnography - invisible, doesn't effect the environment that you study. Ethical issues Role of the researcher in the research process (active, passive, semi-insider, insider, outsider) Problem of "ethnographic truth" (and its also racist dimensions) Role of the research participants in the research A way of doing analysis and writing up insights form obtained material Research diary, photography, notes Constant self-reflection in terms of the way your presence influences your field

Jeffreys - Women are oppressed because of their sex Feminists must fight the rise of transgenderism Tone of the article - men's fantasy of being women, offensive phrases, literature is outdated and she references herself a lot, methodology is critique-able Idea that transition is not a process you don't go through alone Medical positioning within transgenderism should be critically examined Term originates from medicine Gender as inherently oppressive - transgenderism reinforces gender binaries Lesley Finburg - started the term transgenderism which was a fuck you to gender binarism Essentialising gender binary by saying that transgender people are perpetuating gender binaries Focuses so much on biology that she doesn't give space for gender itself, she doesn't extricate gender from sex Post-transexual manifesto Dean Spade "Mutilating Gender" Nat Raha - "slow death" concept Propose debate - counter debate - dialogue between the t...

Transfeminism What is gender? Gender governs livability and restrictions Masculinity/Femininity - in conversation with sex and identity - performative, social constructions Dynamic, a process, a becoming Central themes of the debate Fundamental question of what "gender" is and who/what constitutes a woman Tension between politics and academic engagement Inclusion/Exclusion - both physical and symbolic Essentialism vs social constructionism What is the place of affect? What emotions did you notice in the texts? What emotions came up for you while reading? Anger - intellectual sloppiness with lack of academic rigour - it is our responsibility to point out her flaws - emotional sensitivity bell hooks - theorising from a place of pain and trauma but also critically reading oppositional texts C. Jacob Hale "Suggested Rules for Non-Transsexuals writing about transsexuals, transsexuality, transsexualism, or trans___"  Tensions in the debate Radical...

Globalist Capitalist Hegemony Difference as microlevel differences with a global system that purports cultural/symbolic inequalities and access/distribution inequalities Mohanty - How can we work across the particularity of microdynamic experiences (geopolitically located groups) and put them in conversation with an analysis of macro-level particularities (global systems)? How we work with differences but are still able to address global dynamics? Naturalisation of capitalist values Fraser - tension between identities and identity politics, and theoretical/political analysis that moves beyond identity that separates, marginalised, isolates - identity that leads to a just, egalitarian society. How to focus on specific identities whilst also creating a society that helps to solve marginalisation. Identity politics - Debate around shift from Marxist feminism and approach to social justice movement and who was making this claim for justice In feminist activist communities, ...

Fraser, Nancy (2000) ‘Rethinking Recognition.’ New Left Review 3 "from Rwanda to the Balkans, questions of 'identity' have fuelled campaigns for ethnic cleansing and even genocide" p.1 "thanks to the sustained neoliberal rhetorical assault on egalitarianism, to the absence of any credible model of 'feasible socialism' and to widespread doubts about the viability of state-Keynesian social democracy in the face of globalization, their role has been greatly reduced." p.1 Problem of displacement: "questions of recognition are serving less to supplement, complicate and enrich redistributive struggles than to marginalize, eclipse and displace them." p.1 Problem of reification: "today's recognition struggles are occurring at a moment of hugely increasing transcultural interaction and communication, when accelerated migration and global media flows are hybridizing and pluralizing cultural forms." p.1. This serves to "simp...

Willis, Paul, and Mats Trondman. 2000. “Manifesto for Ethnography.” Ethnography 1 (1): 5–16. Ethnography involves "direct and sustained social contact with agents" and "richly writing up the encounter, respecting, recording, representing... the irreducibility of human experience." p.5 Ethnography can make a contribution "to the critique of over-functionalist, over-structuralist and over-theorized views and to the positive development of reflexive forms of social theorizing" p.7 For ethnographers, "theory must be useful theory in relation to ethnographic evidence and the 'scientific energy' derived from the effective formulation of problems, rather than theory for itself." p.7 The authors argue that "'theoretically informed' ethnographic writing has a crucial role to play in reshaping 'theory' and in finding accommodations between, as well as forging new lines and directions from, social theorists." p.8 ...

Raha, Nat, (2017). ‘Transfeminine Brokenness, Radical Transfeminism.’, The South Atlantic Quarterly. Vol. 116, no. 3: pp. 632-646. The visibility of trans people through public discourse is creating a push for transgender legal rights. However, this change is not coming to fruition, largely because of a neoliberal governments. "This moment of liberal transgender politics, which I have elsewhere described as "trans liberalism," harmonizes with global capitalist restructuring and reaffirms this stratification (Raha 2015)." p.633 Since Brexit and the rise of the far right, "the politics of trans liberalism faces a potential backlash" p.634 "Brexit further undermines the means to economic survival for all who do not hold a UK passport working in the country" p.634 "the government has made immigration enforcement a statutory duty of employers, universities, schools, and landlords, and the United Kingdom continues to attempt to deny the ...

Stryker, S. and Bettcher, T. M. (2016). ‘Introduction: Trans/feminism.’ TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Vol. 3, nos. 1-2: pp. 5-13. "we understand there to be a relationship between antitransgender scholarship and the concrete manifestation of antitransgender politics" p.6 The TSQ believes that Sheila Jeffrey's text "lacked scholarly merit" p.7 "In foregrounding the necessity of attending to class and race as well as sex and gender, intersectional feminism raised the question of whether "woman" itself was a sufficient analytical category capable of accounting for the various forms of oppression that women can experience in a sexist society" p.8 Queer and poststructuralist approaches to gender and feminism "enabled a more varied understanding of the complex and ever-shifting processes through which identity, embodiment, sexuality, and gender can be configured." p.9 Angela Douglas on being a feminist, "To some, I wa...

Reinharz, Shulamit. 1992. “Feminist Interview Research.” In Feminist Methods in Social Research, 18–45. New York: Oxford University Press. Why is interviewing appealing to feminist researchers? Qualitative data-gathering differs from ethnography "in not including long periods of researcher participation in the life of the interviewee" p.18. It differs from survey research interviewing by "including free interaction between the researcher and interviewee." p.18 "Open-ended interview research explores people's views of reality and allows the researcher to generate theory." p.18 "interviewing offers researchers access to people's ideas, thoughts, and memories in their own words rather than in the words of the researcher. This asset is particularly important for the study of women because in this way learning from women is an antidote to centuries of ignoring women's ideas altogether or having men speak for women." p.20 "In...

Best, Amy. 2003. “Doing Race in the Context of Feminist Interviewing: Constructing Whiteness Through Talk.” Qualitative Inquiry 9 (6): 895–914. "among members of the trade, research is defined as a socially organized experience" p.895 "As researchers do research, they also are actively engaged in doing race." p.895 The politics of position: Researchers as insiders and outsiders in the field Issues concerning qualitative researchers: "Negotiating the researcher role, issues relating to the outsider/insider status of the researcher and matters of rapport" p.896 "On what grounds can researchers authorize themselves to construct accounts of groups who often sit in positions subordinate to our own?" p.897 Mapping whiteness within the context of feminist interviewing "fieldwork serves as an interaction context through which the researcher's racial identity and the racial identities of those under study are actively managed, n...

Race and Borders (and Mobility) Radical writing by women of colour - The Bridge Poem The Phenomenology of Whiteness - Oreintations of whiteness - Inhabiting a white world as a non-white body - institutional habits/whiteness Is Ahmed talking about Whiteness in a specific geopolitical location? Because she inhabits the world in the UK If it is not reducible to white skin, what is reducible to? You may be able to appreciate what you have, but be unable to understand the boundaries of what can you achieve Stop and Search policy in the UK  Black students at Oxford being stopped by porters Alice Walker The English language was not made for Black people  The borders of the page and the borders that block out Black people Stoppages that come up in feminism - womanist prose (black women who felt excluded from feminism created womanism)  Avoid the cooption of the text for White people as it was written for Black women You can still learn to centre another e...

Walker, Alice ([1972] 1994) ‘In Search of Our Mother's Garden.’ Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism. A. Mitchell. Durham: Duke University Press, 401-409. "They stumbled blindly through their lives: creatures so abused and mutilated in body, so dimmed and confused by pain, that they considered themselves unworthy even of hope." p.401 "They forced their minds to desert their bodies and their striving spirits sought to rise, like frail whirlwinds from the hard red clay." p.402 "The agony of lives of women who might have been Poets, Novelists, Essayists, and Short-Story Writers... who died with their real gifts stifled within them." p.403 "Black women are called, in the folklore that so aptly identifies one's status in society, "the mule  of the world," because we have been handed the burdens that everyone else - everyone else - refused to carry." p.405 "But when, you will ask, did m...

"The simple thing to say is that interview research is research conducted by talking with people. It involves check blackboard Handbook of Feminist Research: Theory and Praxis Three types of interviews: Structured - fully controlled, closed questions Semi-structured - partial control, open but structured questions Unstructured - minimal control, open questions (not predefined questions, follow what they find important in regards to your research questions) Positivist hangover on structured interviews - creating a form of validity, control over the sample. Interviewees have a lot of agency, what are they not saying, what is their body language telling you Challenges Finding informants - Dynamics between interviewee and interviewer - power, language (academic), cultural differences, relationality Choosing place & creating atmosphere for interviewing To record or not to record? To take notes or not to take notes? Transcription Interaction - not answering...

Kim, Hyun Sook (2007). ‘The Politics of Border Crossings: Black, Postcolonial, and Transnational Feminist Perspectives.’ Handbook of Feminist Research (1st ed). S. Nagy Hesse-Biber. London, New Delhi: Sage, 107-122 "in the current context of globalization, it is necessary to draw important lessons about feminist epistemology and methodology that will enable making connections and linkages across variously polarized communities and places." p.108 "We need to be aware that feminist knowledge production is not innocent or value-free in this context; rather as in other forms of knowledge construction, feminist knowledge is produced within the matrix of power." p.109 Black feminist thought: triple oppression, afrocentric standpoint theory, and the U.S. hegemony "Black feminism can be viewed as "a process of self-conscious struggle that empowers women and men to actualize a humanist vision of community" (Collins, 1989)" p.110 Collins argues t...

Mahmood, S. (2004). The Subject of Freedom, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival of the Feminist Subject, Princeton University Press (esp. 1-24) "how should issues of historical and cultural specificity inform both the analytics and the politics of any feminist project?" p.1 "The suspicion with which many feminists tended to view Islamist movements only intensified in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks" p.1 "why would such a large number of women across the Muslim world actively support a movement that seems inimical to their "own interests and agendas," especially at a historical moment when these women appear to have more emancipatory possibilities available to them?" p.2 "The women's mosque movement is part of the larger Islamic Revival or Islamic Awakening" p.3 "the mosque movement had emerged in response to the perception that religious knowledge, as a means of organizing daily conduct, had become...

Braidotti, R. (2008). In Spite of the Times: The Post-secular Turn in Feminism, Theory, culture & society, 25 (6), (pp. 1-24) "the postsecular turn challenges European feminism because it makes manifest the notion that agency, or political subjectivity, can actually be conveyed through and supported by religious piety, and may even involve significant amounts of spirituality." p.2 On Political Subjectivity "There are two key ideas at work in this feminist legacy: the first concerns high secularism in the sense of its stated doctrine of the separation of powers... This idea of secularism results in the polar opposition between religion (private belief system) and political citizenship (public domain)." p.3 "The second key idea is that an entrenched form of anti-clericalism constitutes a persistent feature of the European left and of the emancipatory movements it supported." p.4 "any unreflective brand of normative secularism runs the risk...

Braidotti - The postsecular turn We as feminist should look for more creative solutions and the potential in phenomena that may appear negative at first. "The political economy of subjectivity I have been arguing for does not condition the emergence of the subject on negation but on creative affirmation, not on loss but on vital generative forces. This shift is central to the postsecular turn in feminist theory, which imagines a subject whose existence, ethics and politics are not indexed on negativity and hence on the horizon of alterity and melancholia." p.19 Not finding solutions to the oppression but as a reaction to the oppression which may not be as useful at fighting the oppressors themselves. Solution needs a problem in order to exist. Oppressive structures provide the conditions for their overturning by affirming your own positionality and desire to live against opposition. Exposes the illusion of secularism - throughout the whole piece, she shows the most ...

Jeffreys, S. (2014.). ‘Introduction’, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism, London/New York: Routledge, pp. 1-13. "Transgenderism depends for its very existence on the idea that there is an 'essence' of gender, a psychology and pattern of behaviour, which is suited to persons with particular bodies and identities." p.16 "Transgenderism hurts lesbian communities, which are fractured over the entryism of men who transgender, and the disappearance of their members to the chemically and surgically constructed heterosexuality that transgenderism offers to increasing numbers of lesbians." p.19 "Women may change their economic class status with upward mobility, but they remain women unless they elect to transgender and claim membership in the superior sex caste." p.22 "The inferior sex caste status of women is assigned with reference to their biology, and it is through their biology that their subordination is e...

Ahmed, Sarah (2007) ’A phenomenology of whiteness.’ Feminist Theory 8.2: 149-168. "We can consider how whiteness becomes worldly as an effect of reification. Reification is not then something we do to whiteness, but something whiteness does, or to be more precise, what allows whiteness to be done." p.150 "The starting point for orientation is the point from which the world unfolds: the 'here' of the body, and the 'where' of its dwelling. Given this, orientations are about the intimacy of bodies and their dwelling places." p.151 "The family home is only ever co-perceived and allows the philosopher to do his work. By reading the objects that appear in Husserl's writing, we get a sense of how being directed towards some objects and not others involves a more general orientation towards the world." p.151 "What you come into contact with is shaped by what you do: bodies are orientated when they are occupied in time and space....

hooks, bell (1990) ‘Postmodern blackness.’ Yearning, Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 23-31. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: " Claims that bodies, matter, or the objects investigated by the natural sciences are “discursively constructed” or “socially constructed” do not assert that the external world would disappear if people stopped talking about it. Rather, they assert a kind of nominalism: that the world does not dictate the categories we use to describe it, that innumerable incompatible ways of classifying the world are available to us, and therefore that the selection of any one theory is a choice that cannot be justified by appeal to “objective” truth or reality." At the beginning, bell hooks feels that postmodernism excludes black people, but predominantly black women because of the academic language used, the lack of engagement with black female scholars and it constructs culture as though black women had no role in black ...

Critical Theory (1930's-40's) Frankfurt School of Social Research Adorno/Horkheimer influential for many feminist writers grand claims with the aim to change the world the longing for an emancipatory agenda Postmodernism (1960's-80's) Lyotard Used interchangeably with poststructuralism in anglo-american context First used in architecture (postmodern) Used as synonym for post-fordist, late or fast capitalism (rise in western consumer culture, multinationalism) Pastiche - using someone's work and making something new from it Poststructuralism (1970's-80's) Linguistic turn focuses on cultural life as the production and reading of text and the one the deconstruction of these text No post structuralist How language influences research Shift of interpretative focus: language as constitutive of world-making Feminist poststructural theorising revolves around subjectification Similarities All three approaches question binaries (West/East) ...

The subject in relation to the body Beauvoir - woman does not occupy the subject position but is positioned in relation to men Male is a neutral/transcendental subject, the Female is the sexed object The woman carries the burden of being female, which stops her from asserting her subjectivity Spade - critical intervention of legal forms for trans people Bodies that cannot occupy a subject position vs. legitimate bodies Spade and Beauvoir - being taken seriously, how some bodies are cast aside or subjected to violence by institutions of power - institutions that classify subjects Being trans does not offer you the same life chances by institutional bodies Butler - How the subject is constructed in relation to the abject Subject and everything that gets excluded - connects to Spade's unconventional identities For a subject to exist, there has to be abject beings The subject is constructed through identities that cannot occupy the subject. The body is discursiv...

Spade, Dean (2011) ‘Administrating Gender.’ In: Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, Brooklyn, NY: South End Press, 137-169. "Critical trans politics requires an analysis of how the administration of gender norms impacts trans people's lives and how the administrative systems in general are sites of production and implementation of racism, xenophobia, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, and ableism under the guise of neutrality." p.137 "the categorization of people works as a key method of control. Population-level interventions rely on categorization to sort the population rather than targeting individuals based on bahaviors or traits." p.138 "Population-level care-taking programs always include population surveillance as a core function of their work." p.140 Programs that use data collected from the population allow the government to have an overview of the needs and risks of the population.  ...

De Beauvoir, Simone ([1949] 2011) ‘Introduction.’ In: The Second Sex. Translated by C. Borde and S. Malovany-Chevallier. New York, Vintage. Introduction "Everyone agrees there are females in the human species; today, as in the past, they make up about half of humanity; and yet we are told that "femininity is in jeopardy"" p.23 "not every female human being is necessarily a woman; she must take part in this mysterious and endangered reality known as femininity." p.23 "the fact is that every concrete human being is always uniquely situated." p.24 "The defiant position that American women occupy proves that they are haunted by the feeling of their own femininity." p.24 "The relation of the two sexes is not that of two electrical poles: the man represents both the positive and the neuter... Woman is the negative, to such a point that any determination is imputed to her as a limitation" p.25 "Humanity is male, an...

Fraser, N. (1989). ‘Talking about Needs: Interpretive Contests as Political Conflicts in WelfareState Societies.’ Ethics, vol. 99, no. 2, pp. 291–313. "needs-talk functions as a medium for the making and contesting of political claims. It is an idiom in which political conflict is played out and through which inequalities are symbolically elaborated and challenged." p.291 Does the emergence of the needs idiom "betoken an extension of the political sphere or... a colonization of that domain by newer modes of power and social control?" p.292 "needs claims have a relation structure; implicitly or explicitly, they have the form ' A needs x   in order to y.'" p.292 "I believe that thin theories of needs which do not descend into the murky depths of such networks are unable to shed much light on contemporary needs politics. Such theories assume that the politics of needs concerns only whether various predefined needs will or will not be prov...

Sangster, 'Telling our stories: feminist debates and the use of oral history' feminist oralist history based on poststructuralist insights Oral history as a methodology that empowers women through knowledge production Discourses are not free from cultural structures and there may be biases in oral history collections Validity of oral history - data triangulation (use other methods as well) - oral history is not so much about validity but more about experiences. Feminist history rather than finding one truth. Validity is about the outcome and that should be a truth - oral history is more about the process. The words of the interviewer should be held as central rather than the interpretation of the researcher. Feminist materialist context - relates to the idea of post-structuralism - everything is relative and random - a feminist response is we are embodied being, and we have experience - brings poststructuralism back to feminism - we have to focus on the lived experie...

Sex and Gender The Second Sex Engages at the level of theoretical concepts rather than practical/ethnographic problems Theorises and complexifies the idea of being a woman An essentialist text which she theorises different experiences/subject positions of the woman. She theorises the unmarked woman who is beyond any question of class/race/sexuality (does discuss the 'lesbian') She reinstates an association between biological sex and being a woman. Judith Butler responds to de Beauvoir- she sows the seeds of her project in 'The Second Sex'. She builds upon her reading to theorise that it is not the body you're born in, but the society expectations and norms. Gaitan's response to 'The Second Sex' - it's not correct to read it the way Butler does, she is not talking about sex or gender, she doesn't disconnect the body and signification of it. Gaitan's ethical project that she builds on the de Beauvoir. Spade - speaks to Butler...