Wokism, the facts n°26 - May 2024
Conferences and events
Transdisciplinary Masters Study Day on Gender
As every year since 2013, the transdisciplinary master's day on gender will bring together master's students from all disciplines, from one of the three faculties of Sorbonne University or from one of the establishments of the Sorbonne University alliance (University of Technology of Compiègne, Insead, Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Pôle supérieur d'enseignement supérieur artistique de Paris Boulogne-Billancourt, Centre international d'études pédagogiques) whose research topic is interested in gender(s), women, sexed bodies, sexualities, feminisms, masculinities, intersectionality, "queer" studies and trans studies.
Territory(ies) and genre(s) in the Americas
Far from considering territory as an element of gender determinism, it will rather be a tool to address gender norms, visible both on a collective and individual scale. Similarly, territory will be considered as a producer of inequalities, discriminations and multiple violences, notably through discriminatory urban planning, territorial arrangement and social management policies. How does territory shape identities and bodies through gender, race and class norms? We will question the colonial processes of feminization and dehumanization of colonized peoples (among others, the European conquests of indigenous territories or the consequences of the Chaco War (1932-1935)). We will consider questions of the continuity of these dynamics of domination, such as the issue of forced sterilizations of indigenous people in Peru (1990), the disappearances and feminicides of indigenous women in Canada, denounced by the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC), or the constant violations of the right of indigenous people to self-management and the invisibility of indigenous languages in Mexico. The political instrumentalization of gender issues (restrictions on the right to abortion in the United States, the ban on inclusive writing under the Milei government in 2024), sexualities and bodies as vehicles of local norms and customs, as well as the socio-geography of gender, race and class violence will also be addressed.
Inclusive writing: what if we got started? Le Robert
Adopting inclusive writing is a challenge in many ways. This practice invites us to individually and collectively reexamine the uses we make of words and what matters in our expression. It also leads us to experiment with new ways of saying and doing, and often to fight against our writing automatisms (of formulations, spelling, agreements). The book "Inclusive writing: what if we got started?" was published by Éditions Le Robert in 2023 and brings together, under the direction of Raphaël Haddad, PhD in Information and Communication Sciences, collaborators from different backgrounds (linguists, political scientists, writers, policy makers, publishers, communication managers, etc.). It has three main objectives: to help us understand inclusive writing and its challenges; to take stock of this practice, writing conventions, current experiments and debates; and finally provide tools, without avoiding sensitive or currently unanswered questions, with concrete and documented examples.
Describing and teaching languages through the prism of gender: scientific and political issues
This conference brings together in a single space for reflection researchers whose work articulates gender and language from different perspectives, exploring questions related to the description of languages or their teaching. It is particularly interested in theoretical and methodological frameworks, as well as research fields and positions.
Trans* Philosophies
A study day organized by Ruby Faure (LEGS, Paris 8) and Emma Bigé (HEAD, Geneva / CNDC, Angers) as part of the seminar “Twisting Philosophy: Introduction to Queer and Trans Theories” at the Philosophy Department of Paris 8 University.
Queer Antiquity: History, Reception, Creation
From Aphrodite to biopower, the devices of sexuality take multiple forms and produce varied identities in time and space. While they have often served as prestigious models to legitimize current practices and standards ("the" law, "democracy", "philosophy"), Greece and Rome can also and above all allow us to deconstruct categories whose historical and dynamic dimension is too often forgotten. As societies before sexuality, according to David Halperin's expression, the study of Greek and Roman societies allows us to "disturb" gender and sexuality, to "twist" essentialisms and fxities, to "queer" them in the etymological sense of the term as in its contemporary sense. At least two approaches allow us to use the past to (re)think current standards of identities and sexuality. One is to seize ancient objects and themes to produce a new discourse and play with forms and images, and all the emic potentialities they contain. Another is to take anew our approaches to Greek and Roman cultural practices, societies that 19th and 20th century historiography has often constructed in its own image. We then discover, through a process of differential comparison, ancient categories that are much more fluid than we imagined, a source of inspiration for art, politics and literature.
Calls for contributions
AAC: Conference “Sexuality, racism and migrations”
The organizing members of a conference scheduled for November 18 and 19, 2024, entitled "Sexuality, racism and migrations", and organized jointly by IC Migrations, the French Sociology Association (AFS) and Ined, are launching a call for papers.
"This multidisciplinary conference focuses on the interweaving of racism and sexuality. It will aim to establish what the social construction of race owes to sexuality and, reciprocally, how racism participates in constructing the (potentially minoritized) experience of sexuality. These days will be, in particular, an opportunity to question the notion of sexual minoritization through the prism of social relations of race and migration, and to make visible empirical work that studies the articulation between racism and sexuality. Their visibility involves important scientific and political issues insofar as, in France, the constitution of racism and sexuality as an object of study has been complex, long and late (Streiff, 1997; Bozon, 2005)", they write.
Against I: Gender and Minority Enunciations in Literature
This conference, Against I: Gender and Minority Enunciations in Literature, proposes to explore the various enterprises of "undermining" enunciative instances (in particular "discourses of knowledge-power", Foucault, 1976), whether poetic or narrative. It is not only a question of affirming that "I am an other" for minority enunciations - which is nevertheless good to recall, Planté, 2002 -, but also of observing how these dissident speeches, which are as many political positions, "act" on the conditions of enunciation of the subject, of which they redefine the margins/norms in order to make a discourse "one's own" heard. This involves twisting a socio-historically situated enunciative instance by the position occupied by “majority” subjects (doxographers or “moral entrepreneurs”, “who create the norms […] and who enforce them”, Becker, 1961) – in the sexual field, in particular – but also becoming master of the discourse usually held by this “I” on “the other”.
Affinities without limits: methodologies for a comparative history of literatures of desire between people of the same sex. 19th-20th century (Prague)
The book project aims to better grasp and provide understanding of the complexity of representations of same-sex desire in literature written in European languages: from the end of the 19th century, when the first contemporary definitions of homosexuality appeared in different European spaces, to the end of the 20th century, when the global AIDS pandemic disrupted a number of these representations. This terminus ad quem also represents a period of decriminalization and theorization in Western countries, which allowed the emergence of historical approaches, such as gay and lesbian studies, and then the more recent conceptual turn of gender studies, queer studies and trans studies.
Lose, retain, regain the nationality of the former colonial power
The conference "Losing, preserving, regaining the nationality of the former colonial power" aims to establish an inventory of existing studies and to encourage new research on the recomposition of nationality ties in the former colonial powers after independence. Drawing on various disciplinary perspectives (history, political science, sociology, law, etc.), it will also allow for an examination of the methods and sources available. This event also aims to constitute an international network of researchers interested in the transformations of nationality ties in relation to colonial and postcolonial histories, with a view to future comparative research and international collaborations.
Among the case studies, a specific interest will be given to France, the Netherlands, Portugal and the United Kingdom. Significant differences may have characterized these countries in the organization of relations between the metropolises and the colonies, as well as the ideologies surrounding the "mission" of the colonial authorities in the administered territories. Despite these differences, these four countries have in common the fact that they have extended, at different times, imperial nationality to populations described as "natives", " inlanders "," indigenous " or "we virgin " in a degraded framework, while reserving access to theoretical full citizenship to tiny minorities distinguished by the colonial administration ("naturalized", " assimilated as »…). During decolonizations, the retention or loss of the nationality of the former colonial power was managed in various ways. In order to question these divergences and similarities, particular attention will be paid to communications that address the British, French, Dutch or Portuguese contexts. However, proposals envisaged on other former colonial powers are very welcome. Similarly, communications that would focus on the reconfiguration of imperial nationality at the end of the colonial period will be welcomed.
Participants are encouraged to include their proposals in four main research areas that the conference aims to develop.
AAC: “Reproductive (In)justice: Reproductive Rights through the Prism of Gender, Race and Class Domination Relations”
Le Reproductive Justice Research Group is launching a call for papers for a scientific event on November 28 and 29, 2024: “Reproductive (In)justice: Reproductive rights through the prism of gender, race and class domination relations”. “In order to be able to understand the multiple and intersectional inequalities faced by minority, racialized and/or foreign people in accessing their reproductive rights, we propose to rely on the theoretical and activist framework of reproductive justice.”, specifies the announcement.
Publications
Mental health of LGBTI exiles: intersectional violence and community support
Intersectional violence suffered by LGBTI exiles in France, due to non-welcoming policies, has deleterious effects on mental health. LGBTI community support can reduce these effects through the reconstitution of protective social capital.
Scientific research and association reports report significant psychological fragility among LGBTI migrants, due to complex, intersectional violence, which originates both in sexual orientation and gender identity or expression (SOIEG) and in the challenges of migration. These sources of violence are intertwined throughout the migration process, aggravating the situation of LGBTI exiles and their living conditions at each stage, with more or less direct effects on mental health. The non-welcoming approach, which prevails in French migration policies, accentuates these difficulties. The management of mental disorders is thus deficient, even for people seeking asylum and therefore in a legal situation. In addition to restrictions on health rights, there is a lack of resources invested in the health sector and more specifically in mental health.
Trans illegality/illegitimacy: from false speech to fictitious speech
1The content of this text is part of a postdoctoral reflection that I am beginning on the relationships existing, in queer narratives, between narration, legality and legitimacy. It is a work still in its infancy and its first hypotheses, which I therefore risk sharing by evoking the first novel by the Chinese-Canadian author Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Fems and Notorious Liars (2016). Translated as “Magnificent and Dangerous Women” by XYZ editions (2021), the work is an initiatory story, a sort of coming of age which tells the story of an anonymous narrator-character (because we never learn her name, although we learn the names of all the other characters). She grew up in the imaginary city of Gloom, which can be likened to a fantastical version of Vancouver, since the description of a grey colonial city by the sea fits it quite well. The story begins when the narrator decides to leave Gloom and the world of the nuclear family in order to begin her gender transition, thus disappointing all the parental hopes placed in the "boy of the family" that she embodies in their eyes. She then takes the road to The City of Smoke and Lights (where Montreal is easily recognized for its shady life and bilingualism), where she intends to start a new life. There, more precisely on the street of miracles (Street of Miracles), she meets a community of “fems” – also fierce and fierce as the title suggests – to which she fits. Following the brutal assassination of Soraya, one of them, and faced with the inaction of the police, some of the women of the rue des miracles decide to form a league of justice (the Lipstick Lacerators) targeting violent men. The initiative degenerates quite quickly (since the police get involved), and the gang is then dissolved after the narrator accidentally kills a policeman whose ghost haunts her.
Situating the theory: thoughts of literature and situated knowledge (feminisms, postcolonialisms)
This issue of Fabula-LhT aims to provide an initial overview of the perspectives opened up in literary studies by situated research practices. While the word situation is making a comeback in discourses on literature, it now seems loaded with new theoretical and political references. First, in terms of its uses, the expression "situated knowledge" is used by activist discourses to legitimize forms of non-academic knowledge. In this respect, it intersects with certain work carried out over the past fifty years in many disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, political science, and biology. Second, in terms of its theoretical genealogy, the notion of situation has been considerably enriched by the reflections carried out in the context of feminist and postcolonial studies. These thoughts have acquired, in academic discourse in France, unequal visibility, as well as a variable place depending on the discipline. The aim here is to take hold of it from the specific point of view of literary studies in order to question an object and a corpus: those of literary theory.
Items
Feminist epistemologies and psychology
Traditionally, psychology makes feminism an object external to itself by situating itself in a superior position, from which it seeks to evaluate both its effects on individuals and groups and the scientific relevance of its theses. However, far from constituting what this discipline reduces to simple ideological positions, feminism must also be recognized as a set of epistemologies capable of revealing the situated character of all psychological knowledge or practice. Such a perspective opposes the positivist myth of a psychology promising to express itself from what Donna Haraway calls the "divine thing", which consists of perceiving everything in an omniscient manner.
This book aims to illustrate the interest of this opposition through contributions relating to the way of putting feminist epistemologies to work, both for a critique of knowledge in psychology and for a reflexive practice in research or clinic. These contributions demonstrate, each in their own way and according to various localities, that doing psychology as a feminist implies fighting against the claim to political neutrality and all other forms of scientific dogmatism likely to maintain, through the epistemic injustices that they potentiate, a hetero-patriarchal social order.
Priscille Croce, Where are the anti-sexist children's albums?
Have you often read children's books without sexist stereotypes?
In this essay, researcher Priscille Croce analyzes the entire production of children's albums that question gender norms, i.e. nearly 200 albums from 1975 to 2023. We thus observe the majority trends, the most marginal ones as well as the lack of gender representations in children's literature, offering everyone the possibility of developing a critical perspective and concrete tools to (re)think their library.
The collection "J'aimerais t'y voir" offers a space for thinking about current research and practices around representations in children's literature, more precisely within the production of children's albums in France. Annotated bibliographic lists complete each work.
