Colloquiums, seminars and conferences
Histories, methods and current events of situated feminist knowledge
At a time when many researchers, activists and artists are claiming to be part of “situated knowledge” (Donna J. Haraway, 1988), this conference proposes – following the preparatory seminar held throughout 2022 – to re-explore its meanings along three axes (not mutually exclusive): what sources, explicit and implicit, are at the origin of Haraway’s text? How is the proposition of situated knowledge positioned in relation to traditions that have also affirmed and claimed the situated nature of knowledge? What are the projects of those who, today, are reactivating the possibilities opened up by the proposition of situated knowledge?
The Witch, Between Historical Object and Feminist Icon. Scientific Perspectives on the Use of a Fascinating Figure
The figure of the witch has been constructed from beliefs stemming from the human imagination from Antiquity to the present day. In the West, the "witch hunt", as the expression goes, began in the Middle Ages. But it was the modern era that judicially and massively condemned these women for the crime of witchcraft in a large-scale historical phenomenon. This repression resulting from progressive criminalization has produced a complex image of the witch, sometimes presented as a militant figure of a feminism forged in the light of very contemporary polemical interpretations. As many media outlets display today, is the witch really pacified, rehabilitated, duly or unduly recovered for the purposes of societal demands or abusively exploited to serve vengeful designs expressed as such?
Trans*Sexuality
Study day organized on Saturday, May 20, 2023 from 10 a.m. to 17 p.m. at the Maison de la recherche of the University of Paris 8 (Amphi UMR 2). Day organized by Ruby Faure (LEGS, Paris 8) as part of the philosophy and gender studies seminar: “Thinking about sexuality: queer/trans* and anti-racist perspectives”.
Conference: Anti-racist children’s literature, Élodie Malanda (University of Angers, online)
There are a good number of works in children's literature that are committed to denouncing racism and making young readers people who are open to the world. However, not all of these works are always effective and some authors even reproduce – unconsciously – the racism that they vehemently criticize. What are the pitfalls of these well-intentioned works? How can we recognize them in order to avoid them? And what are the secrets of works that transmit a true anti-racist awareness to their young readers? Élodie Malanda proposes to show, through selected examples, different anti-racist strategies adopted by works for children and to analyze their effectiveness as tools for anti-racist education.
Call for contributions
Intimacy, Racialization and Affects in Contemporary Migrations
The project aims to explore how the "intimacy-racialization-affects" node is expressed in socio-cultural contexts, migratory and colonial history, as well as political-economic configurations. Through three thematic axes (nation, kinship and family; asylum and affective relations; intermediaries, intermediations and commitment), this project fuels reflections on the relationship between intimacy and racialization in the context of a study day and several scientific meetings.
Publications
Gender and media: what representations?
This collective work in information and communication sciences studies the representations of gender in the media. It addresses both the semiotic and discursive as well as the social and political dimensions of the mediations of gender in media devices. After an introductory chapter that returns to the genealogy of the management of gender in the field of CIS, this work deploys seven new media case studies. Each offers innovative communication analyses of different issues related to gender in situated media corpora (specialist or general press, films, posters) on various themes (fashion, violence against women, pregnancy and sport, cinema, peopolitics, paternity leave, intersectionality). The work is in two parts: the first focuses on thinking about the bodily dimension of the technologies of gender that are the media studied while the second examines media discourses in the light of gender as a significant political matrix.
Wednesday Youth Pages: Three books to explain gender at any age
Gender stereotypes, consent, transgender identity... For young children and teenagers alike, these books help to better understand questions of identity. This guide is useful both to teenagers who are questioning themselves and to their friends who feel powerless. In addition to the traditional definitions (sex, gender, cis, trans, non-binary, agender, etc.), What's My Gender? features testimonies from two transgender teenagers and a young adult, jumps back in time to show that the question is nothing new, and explains what a transition can look like.
Magazine
Raising the question of the difference between the sexes in the social sciences of work and inviting reflection on work in the field of research on gender, deciphering, from the hierarchies, divisions and segmentations that run through the world of work, the status of men and women in society, and thus raising the question of the difference between the sexes: this is the founding hypothesis of Work, Gender and Societies.
Theses
The apprehension of religious convictions by judicial judges, Clara Delmas
These developments borrow from legal theory and moral philosophy to support the steps of a judicial consideration of religious beliefs that would respect the principle of secularism of the public service of Justice while protecting the freedom of religion of individuals. They highlight the tools that would allow (or even require) judicial judges, in the exercise of this control, to take into consideration the religious beliefs of litigants.
“The neutral gender in French, expression of 21st century issues”
This chapter studies how the concepts brought to light by biology, philosophy and gender studies motivate the creation of neologisms that are neither masculine nor feminine, but rather a "neutral gender". Based on observables produced by speakers who deny the State, medicine and society the expertise of their identity and sexual orientation, our analysis shows how the philosophical and political thought called "inclusivity" is at work in this neological activity. We develop a definition of the neutral gender as well as a typology of the different systems of formation of these new words by insertion of typographic characters within the word or by specific morphemes, by binary formation or by non-binary formation. We analyze the tension between norm and variety that results from these innovations in discourse and see how speaking subjects act at the level where systems of social oppression operate, that is to say at the level of symbols. Linguistic solutions to a human problem, these gender-neutral neologisms evolve the binary model of gender inflection in French into a ternary model.
Communications
Situated knowledge and involved research. A clinical and critical approach
This communication presents the epistemological, theoretical and methodological scope of a research crossing the clinical approach and an "international intersectional materialist feminist perspective". It analyzes the interlocking social relations that produce oppression, exploitation, domination, as well as the processes of subjectivation of women at work and in their family. It considers the experience and discourse of women caught in the intersecting social relations as dominant and/or dominated. It adopts a reflexive stance on the place of the researcher in the construction of this research, considering both the clinical analysis of implication and the feminist approach of the situated point of view.
