Gender Studies MA

Michalski, Karin, and Renate Lorenz (2011). “In Conversation with Ann Cvetkovich.” Feeling Bad: Queer Pleasures, Art & Politics (Berlin: no page numbers) "we consider feeling to be a kind of thinking rather than to be that which thinking must transcend or distance itself from." no pg no "I'm interested in how the interview can be made to represent affective and emotional life, in part by approaching it as a performance or an intimate encounter. Like performance, it's a live event informed by the environment in which it occurs, and the exchange between interviewer and interviewee includes gestures, pauses, and emotional valences that aren't always captured in a tape or a transcript." no pg no "The slow temporality of the interview is often one of its powers; new ideas and narratives emerge when the listener's attention enables the interviewee to take time." no pg no "shame and humiliation, like depression, are not endpoints ...

Perera, S., and J. Pugliese (2011). “Introduction: Combat Breathing: State Violence and the Body in Question.” Somatechnics, vol. 1, no.1: 1–14. "In Fanon's meditation on the violence of the colonial state, the subject who is on the receiving end of state violence is positioned in the fraught, traumatic and potentially fatal exercise of 'combat breathing'." p.1 "Combat breathing names the mobilisation of the target subject's life energies merely in order to continue to live, to breathe and to survive the exercise of state violence." p.1 "For Fanon, to be on the receiving end of state violence is always to be reduced to a body in question." p.2 "One of the key objectives and lived effects of state violence is precisely to reduce the target body to an expendable body whose right to be is fundamentally placed in question." p.2 "the logic of state violence is predicated on ensuring that the subject cannot begin to expen...

Helen Meekosha and Russell Shuttleworth: “What’s So ‘Critical’ About Critical Disability Studies?”, in: Australian Journal of Human Rights, 2009, 15 (1), pp. 47-75. "disability studies can be thought of as a critique of specific approaches to disability; a project to evolve an interdisciplinary frame that can be incorporated into multiple disciplines; and a new sphere of scholarly work that has a similar legitimacy to women's studies, black studies and queer studies" p.49 "the social model of disability argued for a conceptual distinction between 'impairment' as a functional limitation and 'disability' as a socially generated system of discrimination." p.50 Critical Disability Studies "represents a distancing from those who have coopted disability studies for simply normalising ends." p.51 Critical Social Theory Critical social theory originated from the Frankfurt School in the 1930's, where the Frankfurt theorists "p...

Alison Kafer: “Introduction: Imagined Futures”, in: Feminist, Queer, Crip, Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013, pp. 1-24. Upon seeing Alison Kafer uses a wheelchair and has been physically scarred by a fire, people imagine a bleak future of isolation and sadness for her. However other disabled people imagine a future for her where ableism, not disability, is the obstacle she must overcome. "What these two representations of the future share, however, is a strong link to the present." p.2 "If disability is conceptualized as a terrible unending tragedy, then any future that includes disability can only be a future to avoid. A better future, in other words, is one that excludes disability and disabled bodies; indeed it is the very absence of disability that signals this better future." p.2 "the value of a future that includes disabled people goes unrecognized, while the value of a disability-free future is seen as self-evident" p.3...

Destabilising hegemonic norms of embodiment and subjectivity Alison Kafer: Feminist, Queer, Crip "Disability continues to be seen primarily as a personal problem afflicting individual people" p.4 Tension between approaching disability as an individual/political issue "Claiming crip, then can be a way of acknowledging that we all have bodies and minds with shifting abilities, and wrestling with the political meanings and histories of such shifts" p.13 Margrit Shildrick: Dangerous Discourses "The trajectory of this chapter, then will play over some historical moments and bring them together with postmodernist and psychoanalytic theory to demonstrate how the security of binary differences is constantly undermined by the irreducible differance  - the refusal of the self/other relation - of the disabled body" p.40 Topics which haven't been studied for a long time - focusing on the history and seeing how it has been hidden/disregarded - the dis...

Cvetkovich, Ann (2012). “Introduction.” In: Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham: Duke University Press, 1–26. The aim of the political depression narrative is to "generate new ways of thinking about agency... The goal is to depathologize negative feelings so that they can be seen as a possible resource for political action rather than as its antithesis." p.2 "feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation." p.3 The affective turn - including emotion, feeling, compassion and sympathy in politics, liberal representation of social issues, historical inquiry. p.3 "the affective turn has been signifying a body of scholarship inspired by Deleuzian theories of affect as force, intensity, or the capacity to move and be moved." p.3 The Public Feeling Project "rethinks distinctions between positive and negative feelings so as not to presume that they are separate from one another or that happiness or pleasure constitutes the absence or ...

Anxiety as Political Affect Power and breath Sia - Big Girl's Cry! The power of anxiety - hidden life of anxious becoming with the lifeless body. A hand moving it's own face into expression - showing an ongoing struggle to live. Self-shaming, self-silencing and hiding. Forces of social norms and expectations, and the "wounding attachments" (Berland, 2011) of desired normativity. Continuum of feeling better to feeling worse. Acuteness and "dis/orienting" (Ahmed, 2006) daily negotiations of the bodily and affective vulnerability of living in un/livability. Deadly despair and terror while continuing living "life as usual". Why do anxieties matter for feminist politics? Check slides Politics of ambivalence - affect and vulnerability - painful and affirmative - hold the two polar opposites together - they are not so polar - politics are always ambivalent in terms of goals/participation (who can participate) - work with ambivalence as a start...

Sylvia Wynter (1994). “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues.” Forum N.H.I. – Knowledge for the 21st Century: Knowledge on Trial, 1 (1): 42-73. "no humans involved" - dehumanisation of the black body, makes it accessible for violence and not necessary for justice Classification - directs our thinking and orders our behaviour The conceptual Other - lack of the human Our inner eyes - the perceptions that cloud our physical eyes By defining a group of people as outside the sanctified universe of obligation, they are put at risk of genocide because they are removed from the circle of care and respect. Bill Cosby's show - "proved that some Black Americans could aspire to, and even be, drawn inside the "sanctified category" of Americans just like us  - if still secondarily so, behind "women" and other "minorities"." p.46 African American men make up almost half of the prison population, but were only 6% of the ...

DESTABILIZING HEGEMONIC NORMS OF EMBODIMENT AND SUBJECTIVITY Why is disability a crucial part of feminist studies? Intersectional approaches, feminism is intrinsically ableist Models of disability  Medical model of disability (something to be treated or prevented) - disability as caused by individual's impairments and bodily differences from the normative body. Focuses on the way how body or a person is not aligned to the norm. The needs of a person are secondary. Creates dependence on the medical system and on the social context. Goal - fixing impairments, providing necessary structures for survival but not full existence. Social model of disability (adapting an environment to the individual) - disability is a socially constructed phenomenon - caused by the way societies are organised rather than by individual's specific form of embodiment. Goals - more inclusive society, change in structures accessible buildings, independent living, audio-transcripts of documents and b...

Donna Haraway (2004). “Ecce Homo, Ain’t (Ar’n’t) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Post-Humanist Landscape” in The Haraway Reader. London/New York: Routledge, 47-61. Define figuration - the act of creating a figure "Figuration is about resetting the stage for possible pasts and futures." p.86 "we must have feminist figures of humanity. They cannot be man or woman; they cannot be the human as historical narrative has staged that generic universal." p.86 "I suggest that the only route to a nongeneric humanity... is through radical nominalism." p.88 Define ascetic - characterised by severe self-discipline and abstention from all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons. Define autochthonous - (of an inhabitant, of a place) indigenous rather than descended from migrants or colonists "Humanity, who and part, is not autochthonous. Nobody is self-made, least of all man." p.88 Ecce Homo! The Suffering Se...

Hemmings, Clare (2005). “Invoking Affect.” Cultural Studies, vol. 19, no. 5: 548–67. "the contemporary interest in affect evidences a dissatisfaction with poststructuralist approaches to power, framed as hegemonic in their negativity and insistence of social structures rather than interpersonal relationships as formative of the subject." p.548 "who would not prefer affective freedom to social determinism?" p.548 Affect as the privileged 'way out' of the impasse in cultural studies 1. "post deconstruction we doubt the capacity of constructivist models of the subject to account fully for our place in the world as individuals or groups." p.548 2. "post deconstruction we doubt the capacity of both quantitive empirical approaches and textual analysis to account for the fullest resonance of the social world we wish to understand." p.548 3. "post deconstruction we doubt that the oppositions of power/resistance or public/private can...

Society of control, necropolitics and interpersonal competition Where can you see the overlap between the society of control and technologies, such as smartphones and social media? Double-edged sword - reproducing the society of control through having the opportunity to connect with others Can algorithms predict our resistance? Deleuze - based on management, never based on algorithmic prediction of behaviour - how we understand power Facebook - Panoptican - control yourself because you assume you're being watched How our embodiment/affect is taken advantage of by technology - shaping our subjectivity - down to the way our mental health is being used or effected by the systems we live in Technologies of power (Power as a technique of making certain lives liveable) Define biopower: population control - institutional control through medicine and statistics (letting die and making live) - managing diseases and disasters - majority population Define necropower: Maki...

Gilles Deleuze: “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, in: October, Vol 59, 1992, pp. 3-7 "The family is an "interior," in crisis like all other interiors" p.4 The societies of control, according to Deleuze, which include schools, industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons, are "in the process of replacing the disciplinary societies." p.4 "There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons." p.4 "If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it's because they express the corporate situation with great precision." p.4 The tv show The Office is a perfect example of how "the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions." p.4 "The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual , and the number or admin...

Crossing Is using a multicultural approach creating inclusivity? Barad's concept of intra-action Intra-action - it is not the binary - it prisms the categories, it is all the same, depending on the time and position in which you cut it, it is different. It is never not the same - there is nothing that is not differential. It can be different things at the same time - electron as a wave/particle depending on how you look at it. It is not something before and something else after - it just is. Everything in the world is matter, but just arranged differently. Links to performativitiy - difference is always performative - always already in a process of becoming - performativity of gender - categories are indefinite. We are always already the performance of the becoming of the world - it is our task to link up. Mestiza is not that you start with two identities - but what comes out of it. Intra-action - Anzaldua Borderlands p.100 - "so that we are on both shores at once...

Ana Mendieta - Cuban, feminist artist who worked with her body and it's relationship with landscapes that she imprinted her silhouette upon. Judy Chicago - feminist, 70's artist 'The Dinner Party' 1979 - place names of famous women, plates adorned with elaborate vulva  - inscribing the names of women in art spaces, making women visible by way of they had done (artists, politicians, thinkers) Renee Cox - Hot-en-Tot 1995 (returning the gaze which symbolically re-empowers the subject) and Yo Mama's Supper 1996 Feminist Art & Representation Representation as visibility/ or lack thereof / of artists in art, historical research and insitutions Exposing the workings of representation, power and desire in dominant representations of feminity and the female body Feminist art seeks to intervene in the system of representations, of codes, symbols, and references that have constituted the female experience as inherently feminine, and this includes the woman/female...

Karen Barad (2014). “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting-Together-Apart.” Parallax 20 (3): 168-187. "diffraction is not only a lively affair, but one that troubles dichotomoies, including some of the most sedimented and stablized/stabilizing binaries, such as organic/inorganic and animate/inanimate." p.168 "intra-actions enact agential cuts, which do not produce absolute separations, but rather cut together-apart (one move)." p.168 "The self in positioning itself against the other, constituting the other as negativity, lack, foreignness, sets up an impenetrable barrier between self and other in an attempt to establish and maintain its hegemony." p.170 "Darkness is not mere absence, but rather an abundance. Indeed, darkness is not light's expelled other, for it haunts its own interior. Diffraction queers binaries and calls out for a rethinking of the notions of identity and difference." p.171 Harraway, about Trinh: "Diffraction doe...

Gloria Anzaldúa (2009). “(Un)natural bridges, (Un)safe spaces” in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (ed. by AL. Keating). Durham: Duke University Press, 243-248 "Bridges are thresholds to other realities, archetypal, primal symbols of shifting consciousness." p.243 "Change is inevitable, no bridge lasts forever." p.243 "Rather than legislating and restricting racial identities [the book] tries to make them more pliant. The personal and cultural narratives are not disinterested, objective questionings of identity politics but impassioned and conflicted engagements in resistance." p.245 "In our efforts to rethink the borders of race, gender and identity, we must guard against creating new binaries." p.245 "Though most people self-define by what they exclude, we define who we are by what we include - what I call the new tribalism." p.245 "Bridging is the work of opening the gate to the stranger, within and without. To step across...

Gloria Anzaldúa [1987] (2012). “La consciencia de la mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness” in Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: aunt lute books), 99-113. "The ambivalence from the clash of voices results in mental and emotional states of perplexity. Internal strife results in insecurity and indecisiveness. The mestiza 's dual or multiple personality is plagued by psychic restlessness." p.100 "The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque , a cultural collision." p.100 " La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes." p.101 "Because the future depends on the breaki...

Biopolitics: bodies, control, discipline and security Foucault's technologies of power Sovereign (juridical) power 'premodern' age (middle ages tot 18th century) punishment (physical act on the body: torture) power exercised on the body (to let live and make die) The body of the sovereign is made by the people - above all others Disciplinary power: 'modern' age (18th-early 20th century) Panopticism Internalisation of power structures (to discipline and make confess) Bio-power 'postmodern' age (20th century onwards) regulatory power; population; bio-politics (from end of 18th century) the power of/over life (to let die and make live) Panoptican - seeing everything - Prisons designed by the architect Jeremy Bentham - the idea is that you are always seen - moved away from a guard being able to see you to the idea of always being watched through CCTV Bentham's panopticon "reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather...

Michel Foucault: “Lecture 17 March 1976”, in: Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976, New York: Picador 2003, pp. 239-264. "in the classical theory of sovereignty, the right of life and death was one of sovereignty's basic attributes... that life and death are not natural or immediate phenomena which are primal or radical, which fall outside the field of power." p.240 The subjects relationship with the sovereign means they are neither dead nor alive, but are neutral, and thanks to the sovereign, they have the right to either be alive or dead. p.240 In the nineteenth century, a new right complemented the old sovereign power: "the right to make live and to let die." p.241 The body is controlled by de-individualising and breaking the body down - no longer man-as-body but man-as-living-being or man-as-species so that they form a global mass. p.242 A second seizure of power massifies the individual - "man-as-species"...

Ahmed, Sara (2004). “Introduction: Feel Your Way.” In: The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1–20. "Bodies take the shape of the very contact they have with objects and others." p.1 "the metaphor of 'soft touch' suggests that the nation's borders and defences are like skin; they are soft, weak, porous and easily shaped or even bruised by the proximity of others." p.2 "The association between passion and passivity is instructive. It works as a reminder of how 'emotion' has been viewed as 'beneath' the faculties of thought and reason." p.3 "Emotions are associated with women, who are represented as 'closer' to nature, ruled by appetite, and less able to transcend the body through thought, will and judgement." p.3 "The Darwinian model of emotions suggests that emotions are not only 'beneath' but 'behind' the man/human, as a sign of an earlier and m...

(Anti)hegemonic discourses: on gender, sexuality and migration Discourse - making meaning through language Essentialist - (a discourse) can exist regardless of the historical/cultural/social context of it Constructions - (a discourse) makes sense only if you put it in context (only way to make sense of language and knowledge) Floating signifiers - mean something different in different context (queer, gender, body) Nodal points - have partially fixed meanings (murder) - when a term gains a certain degree of rigidity obtain social dominance then we speak of hegemony   Cultural hegemony - dominance of the ruling class obtained through consent  Objective of hegemony: to construct and stabilise nodal points that are the basis of a social order, the main aim being to become a social imaginary, an absolute limit that structures a field of intelligibility Postmodernism - embracing multiplicity and engaging with fragmentation, the absence of a grand narrative...

Donna J. Haraway: “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”, in: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 65-107 "Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century." p.66 Modern medicine is full of cyborgs "of couplings between organism and machine" p.66 "Cyborg reproduction is uncoupled from organic reproduction." p.66 "The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics." p.66 "the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction and imagination" p.66 "The cyborg is a creature in a power-gender world... In a sense, t...

Samantha Murray and Nikki Sullivan: “Preface” and “Introduction”, in: Somatechnics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies, Ashgate, 2016, pp. xi-xiii, and 1-7. " Somatechnics, a constellatory critical neologism cognisant of the mutual enfleshment of technologies and technologisation of embodied subjectivities, enacts a double process." preface 2 " For Jean-Francois Lyotard, in  The Inhuman , ‘“life”, as they say, is already technique’ " preface 4 " ecotechnics, that which allows us to begin to think this world  here , in a radicalisation or queering of Martin Heidegger, describes the manner in which the body emerges as a locus of interconnection, originarily inserted into a technical environment, always already foreign to itself." preface 5 determinism - the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes regarded as external to the will. Some philosophers have taken determinism to imply that individual human...