Gender Studies MA

Coming to our senses: from the gaze to the senses in cinema The (male) gaze Cinema as an advanced representation system, structured by patriarchy (cultural/dominant norms, hegemonic ideas of certain bodies/people). The act of looking is embedded in power relations. The gaze produced by cinema creates a dualism where: active/male and passive/female. :There are three different looks associated with cinema: that the  camera  as it records the pro-filmic event, that the  audience  as it watches the final product, and that of the  characters  at each other within the screen illusion" On all three levels this act of looking is a play Cinema is based on "the pleasure of looking" and manipulates this visual pleasure. Queer cinema plays with experimental techniques in order to deconstruct the normative ideas of cinema as we know it. Doesn't buy into active/passive male/female of mainstream cinema. Critiques to Mulvey's theory - Psychoanalysis as an...

Life in the SF mode: Visualisations, technologies and imaginaries  Braidotti - how our bodies matter to subjectivity Imagination through the SF mode (Science fiction et al) Jeanette Winderson, The Passion: "I'm telling you stories. Trust me." We often think of storytelling that is moving on a different track than scientific knowledge production. However, Haraway and the SF mode looks at storytelling as a way of creating the world. Storytelling as making worlds of imagination, as a way of writers allowing us to imagine alternatives to the way we live. Realists stay within what is known, whereas Sci-fi writers write about what is not yet. SF mode - Science fiction, String figures, Speculative fabulation, Science facts, Speculative feminist, So far Fabulation - creation of something as opposed to narrative understanding of linear structure String figures - relation between self and other connected to the string - giving and receiving patterns - finding something b...

Gloria Wekker (2016). “The House that Race Built” in White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham: Duke University Press, 50-80. "Race... is not only a matter of ideology, beliefs, and statements about a particular group of people; race also becomes transparent in practices, in the way things are organized and done." p.50-51 1. How the policy interest in women and ethnic minorities was organised on the governmental level 2. Knowledge production about women and ethnic minorities in the sphere of the academy 3. Discipline of women's/gender studies and how it has handled the diversity of axes of signification (race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion) that have become inevitable and pressing subject matter. Whilst working on integration policy for foreign nationals in Holland, Wekker saw how the emphasis was on the allochthonous individuals to make the effort to integrate, not the Dutch to increase their hospitality. In the past thirty years, there ...

Shame Shame as original sin/Shameful origins Feminist reappraisal: Luna Dolezal Feminist critique: Elspeth Probyn Located in the body before it become discursive - blushing/covering one's face Shame as a 'negative affect' or evidence of a pessimistic or even nihilistic worldview Shame  - subject and object of your own shame, judgement of yourself Guilt - the other that makes you feel guilty but not something you are Jean-Paul Satre Being and Nothingness   - Pure shame, "I need the mediation of the Other in order to be what I am" - The look or gaze as judgemental and diminishing, revealing the ultimate exposure and defenselessness of human bodies striving for connection i.e. we need the other in order to exist but these relations are objectifying and alienating. Martha Nussbaum - Primative shame - Sartre argues you need self-awareness and language in order to experience shame; Nussbaum argues it is a pre-linguistic affect present in infants. It expos...

hooks, bell (1988). “Naked Without Shame: A Counter-Hegemonic Body Politic.” In: Ella Shohat (ed.), Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 65–74. "More than Blackness we shared female being, felt the awesome power and presence of Woman becoming. That presence troubled us. We invented gestures of disregard, habits of being that allowed us to forget our bodies." p.66 "To be invisible hurts. To live in our bodies but always away from them was to live always alone in states of fierce and lonely abandonment." p.66 "to live as a brown woman in my flesh, without shame, is pure rebellion." p.66-67 "Rarely does anyone call attention to the complex and diverse ways the body has been foregrounded as a site of conquest in all efforts of colonization." p.67 "Black female bodies are almost always framed within a context of patriarchal, pornographic, racialized sexualisation. They are de-aestheti...

Rage can be constructive - it can be the spark to something more Link to Anzaldua Bridges - rage can be a bridge What are the prerequisites/what is the context needed for rage to be constructive, are there limits to it? Continuous practice of how to project and translate your rage productively - don't internalise it Audre Lorde - anger can be helpful to analyse differences but it may not be productive - can black women use anger/rage to move forward? Can only white transgender people use rage, is it detrimental to black transgender people? Role of rage for articulating the self - not transforming others - your own process of being - how in Stryker's case - she constructs her own narrative that goes agains the medical discourse - assertion of agency - articulating yourself (productive rage) - rage directed outwards Sara Ahmed - Rage can induce you to engage with the problematic - why are they angry, what is provoking that rage/pain? It is the societal pressures that a...

Susan Stryker (1994). “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamunix: Performing Transgender Rage,” GLQ 1 (3): 227-254. "Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster's as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist." p.245 "Because transsexuality more than any other transgender practice or identity represents the prospect of destablizing the foundational presupposition of fixed genders upon which a politics of personal identity depends, people who have invested their aspirations for social justice in identitarian movements say things about us out of sheer panic that, if said of other minorities, would see print only in the most hate-riddled, white supremacist Christian fascist rags." p.245 "A creature, after all, in the dominant tradition of ...

José Esteban Muñoz (2009). “Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Pragmatism” in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York/London: New York University Press, 19-32. Do not dismiss the "we" of utopian visions and demands as "merely identitarian logic", but rather "The "we" speaks to a "we" that is "not yet conscious," the future society that is being invoked and addressed at the same moment." p.20 Links to Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands and the way she addressed the queer future - where people of all races and sexualities are able to relate to each other equally - it is not naive, it is optimistic. "The particularities... are not things in and of themselves that format this "we"; indeed the statement's "we" is "regardless" of these markers, which is not to say that is beyond such distinctions or due to these differences, but, instead, that...

Ahmed, Sara (2014). “Feminist Attachments.” In: The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 168–90. "What role do emotions play in acts of speaking out and in the 'spectacle' of demonstrating against such forms of power?" p.168 Speaking out against the war on terror turns individuals into "terrorists" - "You are with us or against us" - Bush "To 'be with' in this discursive context is not only to support the war, but to support the very world that the war is identified as defending." p.169 "to question the distinction, which is naturalised as given, between some forms of violence (committed by legitimate states) and other forms of violence (enacted either by individuals, networks or 'illegitimate states' in a way that is targeted against 'legitimate states') is to betray the very 'foundations' of this world." p.169 "The attack on the speech translates qu...

Genealogy of anger Not only is anger "cognitive, evaluative, and political - political anger is angry about something - but so is the ability to identify and articulate that emotion as anger." (Kim, 46) Our relationship with objects of oppression change over time "anger already involves a reading of the world in a particular way, and also involves a reading of the reading" (Ahmed, 171) Not all anger is correct - it should be considered within the context. By becoming defensive, you rob anger of the energy used to muster it and evacuate the information it may be holding. "Critical wonder is about recognising that nothing in the world can be taken for granted, which includes the very political movements to which we are attached" (Ahmed, 182) Wonder teaches us to see things differently, out of the ordinary - construction of 'woman' to include Black women (Lorde) - possibilities are filled with hope (hope for a better world) - hope involves...

Kim, Sue (2013). “Anger as Culture.” In: On Anger: Race, Cognition, Culture. Texas: University of Texas Press, 43–69. Anger as Political - Feminist anger Kathleen Woodward in 1996, "Anger is the contemporary feminist emotion of choice" (Anger, 74) p.45 Elizabeth Spelman, "There is a politics of emotion: the systematic denial of anger can be seen in a mechanism of subordination, and the existence and expression of anger as an act of insubordination" (270; quoted in Woodward, 89) p.46 Anger is gendered - white male anger is assuring and definitive, whereas feminine anger is anxiety inducing and abstracting. p.46 "Feminist theorists argue that emotion is something that is produced socially, politically, discursively, and collectively." p.46 "If Freudian guilt is isolating and individualizing, feminist anger is conceived in precisely the opposite terms." (Woodward) p.46 Emotions come in and white clusters, along with affects, institutio...