Gender Studies MA

Karen Barad. “Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings.” GLQ vol. 21, nos. 2-3 (2015): 387-422. "The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born. In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. 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." (Stryker, “My Words,” 238) "Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the simil...

Sara Ahmed. “Interview with Judith Butler.” Sexualities vol. 19, no. 4 (2016): 482- 492 "So I think performativity may operate in the interstices of the willed and the unwilled." p.483 "turning/interpellation: ‘turning around’ as keeping open the possibility of not returning to the same place, or not being affected quite as expected." p.483 "trouble becomes the name for a scene in which a certain effort to contest the status quo is punished or maligned for its ostensible destructiveness." p.484 "Dismantling forms of oppression, for instance, involves a certain way of destroying what has been built badly, built in ways that are consequential in the damage they cause." p.484 "There I am interested in how one is subjected to a norm and also subjectivated, made into a subject, so the norm can be repressive and oppressive, but also strangely, even disturbingly generative." p.484 "I want to say that deviation brings with it a...

Cathy Cohen. “The Radical Potential of Queer? Twenty Years Later.” GLQ vol. 25, no. 1 (2019): 140-144. "because the idea of queer was not overdetermined as a personal/sexual identity, at least in Black communities, it left some space to use the idea of queer as a provocation to imagine how we might organize across varied communities defined as “the other” by the state and/or racial capitalism." p.142 "queer as a unifying framework for mobilization and action or that space available for interrogation and imagining of who could be included in a or the queer political project and what might be the political basis of queer unity is less available as more people adopt queer as a personal politicized identity, embodying a radical identitarian personal politics, as opposed to a collective position relative to state and capitalist power." p.142 The shooting of Rekia Boyd and Micheal Brown and their status as queer subjects: "the targets of racial normalizing proj...

Jain, T. (2017). Researcher vs advocate: Ethnographic-ethical dilemmas in feminist scholarship. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 36(6), 566-585 "the researcher’s positionality and the relationships she forms govern her data collection and eventual production of knowledge to a large extent." p.566 "The textbook ideal of “a completely unobtrusive observer, with no interaction, and therefore no participation” has long been hailed as the gold standard for “purity” of qualitative data (Nason and Golding, 1998)." p.567 "However, the “no interaction” standard is often unattainable because “all social research takes the form of participant observation; it involves participating in the social world, in whatever role, and reflecting on the products of that participation” (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983, p. 16 as cited in Nason and Golding, 1998)." p.567 "Because facts and knowledge are “artefacts created by humans, who are soc...

 Icaza, Rosalba (2017) Social Struggles and the Coloniality of Gender; in Robbie Shilliam and Olivia Rutazibwa, eds. Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics, London, UK. Coloniality refers to "long-standing patterns of power that emerge in the context of colonialism, which redefine culture, labor, intersubjective relations, aspirations of the self, common sense, and knowledge production in ways that accredit the superiority of the colonizer. Surviving long after colonialism has been overthrown, coloniality permeates consciousness and social relations in contemporary life" (Mendoza 2016; 114). "Hence, coloniality is not colonialism, but a complex set of logics (e.g. dehumanization of the colonized) that are common to all forms of colonialism: Spanish, Dutch, British, settler, and non-settler" p.8 "Decolonial thinkers consider both, modernity and capitalism historical outcomes of colonialism. "The colony is both the condition of possibility and the...

Alison Kafer: “Bodies of Nature: The Environmental Politics of Disability”, in: Feminist, Queer, Crip, Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013, pp. 129-148. " the social model of disability is premised on concern for the built environment, stressing that people are disabled not by their bodies but by their inaccessible environments." p.129

Inahara, Minae “This Body Which is Not One: The Body, Femininity and Disability” in Body & Society , 15 (1): 47-62. 2009. "the disabled body is a multiplicity or excess which undermines this able-bodied norm." p.47 "disability has always been conceptualized on the basis of able-bodied parameters." p.48 "attention to bodily differences deconstructs the able-bodied/disabled opposition and explores what is positioned beyond these normative categorizations." p.48 Inahara synthesizes Irigaray's argument about sexual difference to discuss the disabled body. Irigaray "challenges Freud’s and Lacan’s studies of psycho-sexual development and suggests an alternative account of female sexuality which is distinct from masculine conceptualizations of sexual difference. According to Irigaray (1985b: 25): ‘Woman’s desire would not be expected to speak the same language as man’s; woman’s desire has doubtless been submerged by the logic that...

Roderick Ferguson. “Reading Intersectionality.” Trans-scripts 2 (2012): 91-99. "the dominant affirmation of intersectionality posits the category as the means to a positive and authentic knowledge about the lives and experiences of women- and queers of color." p.92 Critiques of intersectionality - commits to an idealist outlook - "intersectionality is thus really an alias for an identity and an identity politics" p.93 "language is a system of arbitrary signs" (Saussure, p.73) "Language is primarily a relation between two sets of things that have 'nothing in common in essence' between them" (Meisel, p.27) "intersectionality is construed as a theory that is ontologically suited for positivist errands that can demonstrate and facilitate the incline of knowledge." p.94 " We can think of the hegemonic affirmation and objection to intersectionality as different effects of power, ones that attempt t...

Do I belong to the group? What would I change (self-reflexive)? What difficulties did I feel? What stops me from conducting interviews? - I don't want to waste the time of the interviewees - I'm not going to produce new research - No one is vetting my questions, what happens if they are inappropriate? - I wanted to interview a prominent member of British Muslim twittersphere. What happens if she doesn't like my research and blasts me on social media? To exist in a place you don't usually exist - heterotopia How many interviews were done (and rejections) The length of time the interviews lasted The format of questions How the information was recorded Social/personal characteristics of the interviewer Interviewee's feelings/reactions about the interview Interviewer's feeling about the interviewee Hospitality offered "Asking back" (Asking the same questions back to me) Key informants - friends - they can help me talk to other women...

Catharine R. Stimpson and Gilbert Herdt (eds.). Critical Terms for the Study of Gender. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. "Linking polarised and metaphorical thinking, binary oppositions have been set up between culture, which men are said to represent, and nature, which women are said to represent; lightness, which men are said to represent, and darkness, which women are said to represent; mind, which men are said to represent, and body, which women are said to represent." p.5 "A wife rebelling against her husband is, in and of herself, a threat to a familial and social order, but this disobedient and upstart spouse also represents a dangerously disobedient and upstart class." p.5 "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" (Beauvoir 1953, 301) " gender does not mean sex, but the social and sexual relationships between the sexes and the place assigned to members of each sex within these relationships....

Anna Poletti. “Periperformative Life Narrative: Queer Collages.” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies vol. 22, no. 3 (2016): 359-379. "To be intelligible as both the author and the subject of an act of life writing, the writer must first meet the requirement of performing a coherent self who lives a life that is at least partly intelligible through existing discourses." p.359 "We must not forget that the aesthetics of self-representation and associated truth claims are inextricably tied up with dominant discourses and practices." p.360 "self-representation can (and often must) reinscribe hegemonic discourses of the subject and what constitutes a life, yet in some instances it can be used to test the limits of those discourses." p.360 Does this relate to the reiteration of practices that Butler talks about? Repeating and changing ever so slightly every time? "the formal properties of a given autobiographical act, in this case a documentar...

Concept of identity - intersectional, not stable, fluid, hailed/forced/self-defined - community/collective memberships, categorisation, socially constituted through discourse, defines us an individual, connects us to larger structure which can funnel us into forms of subjectivity - performative Concept of subjectivity - something which agency - something that makes us human - opposite the object, you're never an individual but are always impact by things around you (identity), something we're given, individual relationship, how we experience the world Subjectivity as the self - self-awareness/consciousness (Butler) - precedes identity, what we need to begin to have an identity, fundamental level of self-awareness, which we achieve through milestones of psychological development. Political - aware of ourselves in political/social places. Identity becomes available from a grounding of subjectivity Subjectivity - shared experience, we all have a self Identity - something...

Media as structural power, media as a form of resistant against expected behaviour Speaking is a result of structure - the requirement of speaking on behalf of is part of a power structure that excludes the subaltern / colonial subject Listening to the oppressed is not so innocent - Who can authentic a story? Who has the power to authenticate? narratives about oppression/exclusion give a structure in which you are positioned as the outsider. "Because women are outside the market, they are not in a class-defined position against capitalism" or "because they are outside of the system they are the agents against capitalism" There is a risk of reproducing power structure when you pay attention to the narrative of those who excluded/exploited. To confirm the structural exclusion of your participants, you do not counter the structure. When you repeat stories of women who suffer, you repeat the image of them being the victim. Narratives about those who are exclude...