Wokism, the facts n°24 - January 2024
Conferences and events
European Ecofeminisms (University of Haute-Alsace)
For nearly ten years, ILLE researchers have been interested in writing about the Feminine through subjects such as learning to become a woman, crime and its questioning according to gender, origin, and life path. Profound changes in the conception of the world and the environment are disrupting this theme, extending it and making it evolve. The asymmetrical structures of power remain: women whose lives and actions are still, despite social progress, often assimilated to being placed under guardianship or being put out of the picture, are still today in the fight against patriarchy and male domination. But what is the contribution of the ecological perspective in this field? For more than thirty years, numerous international studies have shown a parallel between the treatment of the feminine and ecology, the thought of nature and the feminine experiencing the same fight in ecofeminism.
Borders and lesbian literature – Literature on the oblique (Sorbonne)
The next session of the seminar “Literature in the Oblique” will take place January 26, 2024 from 18 p.m. to 20 p.m.This session will be devoted to the question of borders, understood both as a concrete meaning and as a critical concept necessary for the development of lesbian and queer literary and poetic categories.
“Gender and Authority” at the Sorbonne: “Gender, Knowledge, Ideology”
The “Gender and Authority” seminar of the Initiative Genre – Philomel of Sorbonne University will be devoted, in 2022-2023, to the rigorous and scientific exploration of objects recently called into question by virulent attacks: gender, deconstruction, queer, intersectionality.
It is within the framework of this cycle, entitled "Queer Deconstructions", that after a session devoted to "What is gender?", we will welcome for the second session of the seminar, on January 20, 2023, Evelyne Grossman (Professor of French Literature, Université Paris-Cité) will speak on: "What is deconstruction? (gender and deconstruction)"
Queer in Arab Cinema
This study day focuses on exploring queer representation in Arab cinema, with the aim of analyzing the different dimensions of these themes, highlighting the nuances of body language and emotional interactions on screen. In the wake of recent acts of homophobia in the Arab world, this day aims to support the freedom of expression of Arab artists and filmmakers, celebrate creativity and strengthen dialogue around LGBTQ+ issues. It aims to be a source of inspiration, encourage diverse perspectives and create a support network for artists who have chosen to express themselves freely.
Are Muslim women not women?
Whatever the French spaces where they appear, the appearance of "veiled" Muslim women never leaves anyone indifferent. They are at the heart of controversies in which people in power, women and men politicians, define them as a threat to be combated.
According to them, the veil worn by Muslim women is the expression of a political Islam that is corrupting and threatening the Republic. Since Islamism is the political enemy to be fought, those who display their adherence to Islam are designated as the obvious incarnation of this danger. The debate focuses on the failure of French integration in its universalist approach, on the impossible reconciliation between Islam and the values of the Republic, on gender equality but also, and increasingly, on security measures to combat terrorism. They are then excluded from the cause of women. But are they not women?
I propose to analyze the Muslim problem in its gendered dimension, through research conducted among French Muslim women. I show the confrontation between two representations of femininity that assigns Muslim women who wear the headscarf to a paradoxical heretical femininity in which the terms of femonationalism are explicit.
Wars, incarceration and colonial prisons: H(i)story, testimonies and representations
Exported by the colonizer, the prison was used as an instrument to maintain order under the colonial power, its mission was to subjugate the local populations and control the territories. Under the cover of civilizing the natives, the colonial administration used the prison to fight against crime by affecting all social categories (men, women, adults, minors). The prison was also an important source for the colonial economy.
Calls for contributions
Doctoral studies of the Gender pole
As part of the organization of the first doctoral programs of the Gender center of the Lumière Lyon 2 University, the center calls on people enrolled in thesis studies at the Lyon 2 University from all disciplines and all levels to share their research on gender: this theme can designate as much work on identities, social and cultural affiliations, sexualities, sexual characteristics, gender categories, equality, discrimination, binarity, inclusiveness, diversity, intersectionality, etc.
Inclusive writing in the French language: norms and social changes
Today's societies are experiencing profound upheavals in all areas: politics, economics, culture, arts, sports, leisure, religion, etc. This is reflected in the emergence of new forms of struggle such as the recognition of minority rights (LGBT, racial and religious minorities) or gender equality, aimed at ensuring that social practices and types of behavior are accepted by everyone and everywhere. The linguistic aspect of these struggles for recognition and self-affirmation is "inclusive writing". Reflecting on this issue in order to identify its morphosyntactic, semantic-pragmatic implications, as well as the ideological and ethical issues in a rapidly changing society appears to be a necessity. This conference invites specialists in language sciences, exegetes from other social and human sciences, as well as experts from all fields, interested in the issue of inclusive writing, to contribute to the reflection.
Queer Ethics / Queer Corporalities (Longueuil, Quebec, Canada)
This call for papers on Queer Ethics and Queer Corporalities invites academic researchers to present their reflections and analyses on the intersections between, on the one hand, queer ethics and corporality and, on the other hand, the epistemology of care. A reflection on these intersections can lead to a first historical trajectory starting from Michel Foucault's seminal work The Care of the Self (1984), where he emphasizes that even if the codes "[…] concerning the economy of pleasures, marital fidelity, relations between men may well remain analogous", in the future these "[…] will then be subject to a profoundly reworked ethics and another way of constituting oneself as the moral subject of one's sexual behaviors. » (274) As books by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Michael Warner, José Esteban Muñoz, Jack Halberstam, Ann Cvetkovich, Heather Love, Sara Ahmed, Roderick A. Ferguson, Elizabeth Grosz, and others have explored in recent years, queer constructions of the self—diversely situated, discursively shaped, dynamic, disrupting and recomposing received subjectivities and the limits of normativity, sex, gender, class, and race—also present deeply ethical concerns about the intersection of self and society, forms of kinship, family, and care.
Publications
Gender Policies and Engagement: An Introduction
The “Gender Politics and Engagement” dossier is situated at the crossroads of theories of engagement – a notion at the centre of a renewed interest in the contemporary French literary and critical corpus – and Anglophone theories of agency ( ), developed mainly by feminist researchers from the 1990s onwards. At the intersection of these two theoretical sets, this issue of Fixxion examines French-language texts written by women and gay authors – novels, autofictions, autobiographies and essays – where commitment and agency play a leading role in the expression of sexual gender. In this selection of works that exemplarily and manifestly deploy questions of sexual identity – such as sexual abuse, unequal treatment, criticism of physical and symbolic violence, activism, critical exposure of patriarchal heritage, etc. –, different forms of commitment and agency are mobilized and imprint a gendered dynamic on the field of contemporary French expression. The articles in this issue thus aim at the strictly textual inscription of these issues and the discursive strategies that operate specifically in the field of the extreme contemporary.
Adrien Bresson, Alice Baudequin, Jonathan Raffin (dir.), Genre and sources. Reading, rereading, misreading since Antiquity
The challenge of this work is to question the link between gender, which can be defined as the non-physiological components of sex perceived as appropriate to male and female individuals, a field of research highlighted by gender studies, and sources. It is therefore a question of reading the latter from the perspective of gender, of proposing a rereading of them, or even of considering a misreading whose aim then becomes to propose a new reading of the sources. The confrontation of disciplines (classical literature, foreign literature, history, sociology, anthropology) and eras, since Antiquity, has made it possible to uncover approaches to sources specific to each discipline, which can nevertheless prove complementary, encouraging a plural examination of the sources, in the light of a prism that has not yet been explored.
Palestine: decolonial solidarities
In early December 2023, Paris City Hall canceled, due to “risk of public disorder,” a conference by Judith Butler “against anti-Semitism, its instrumentalization, and for a revolutionary peace in Palestine.” The conversation, which was to be held at the Cirque Électrique, was reportedly facilitated by decolonial thinkers Françoise Vergès and Olivier Marboeuf (with a remote intervention by Angela Davis). In addition to the risk of public disorder, Paris City Hall cited “a major risk that the remarks contravene” the principles of feminism, the fight against anti-Semitism, and the fight against homophobia. While the argument is surprising, not to say abstruse (censoring a founding thinker of queer studies because the risk of homophobia would be too high), it at least has the merit of being particularly instructive.
The Gender of Capital: Investigating Inequalities in the Family
Adapted from the eponymous essay, an investigation into the role of the family in perpetuating wealth inequality. The authors focus on the secrecy of notarial offices to highlight the problem of the distribution of wealth between men and women and explore family economic arrangements.
Uberused: Racial Platform Capitalism in Paris, London and Montreal
A sociological approach to the working conditions and capitalization of racialized men by Uber. The author draws on the testimonies of drivers in Paris, London and Montreal to study the daily reality of many men, disappointed but nevertheless docile workers. Valuable for the platform, they are nevertheless victims of control and poor working conditions.
Items
Sylvie Laurent, Poor Little White Man. The Myth of Racial Dispossession. Editions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, Paris, 2020, 318 pages
For the past ten years, a considerable number of whites have believed themselves to be the new victims of "anti-white racism", "reverse discrimination", "replacement" and, for the most extremist, "white genocide".
These speeches, typical of supporters of ethno-racial nationalism, motivated the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the US and threaten to confirm his re-election in November 2020.
In many works, this white communitarian tension is often presented as a political reaction to neoliberal globalization and the new inequalities that result from it, to so-called "massive" immigration and above all to the development of a multicultural society on the verge of ensuring a demographic and cultural upheaval.
Yet these discourses on the even relative "decline" of American whites do not stand up to the study of available data on real inequality and positions of power between blacks, Hispanics and whites.
By reflecting on the historical construction of an ethno-racial national identity in the US, Sylvie Laurent dismantles the new myth of the White victim which has already crossed the Atlantic (Brexit, for example) and which makes invisible racial inequalities which are nevertheless still glaring.
She brilliantly reveals that this discourse is in reality the ultimate sleight of hand of white domination in the United States, which appropriates the posture of the oppressed to preserve a social order shaken by the election of Barack Obama and the activism of minorities.
'Asian model' of integration versus 'Arab-Muslim counter-model'. Symbolic competition and circulation of stereotypes
In this chapter, we will develop our reflection on the production of stereotypes about Asians in France by focusing on a dual perspective. We will first show that the process of racializing representations of Asians in France is as much the product of a majority discourse, apparently "benevolent" (philo-Asianism), as that of interethnic relations. We will thus note a recurring tendency among French opinion leaders (politicians, media, essayists, etc.) to play very largely on the register of symbolic competition between the descendants of immigration, valorizing some to better stigmatize others. Thus, the positive rhetoric about Asians in France, celebrating their ability to integrate socially, to succeed economically and to acculturate easily to secular and republican values, constitutes a roundabout way of denouncing the "negative communitarianism" of Arab-Muslim populations. We will then see how this majority discourse on Asians in France also produces effects on other minorities. We will be interested in both literary and cinematographic fictions depicting interethnic relations but also in the social representations conveyed by French people from other postcolonial migrations, which sometimes relay positive and negative stereotypes about populations of Asian origin. By way of conclusion, we will ask ourselves how this process of widespread racialization within French society is likely to constitute both a factor of divisions and mimetic rivalries between "imagined communities" but also a vector of awareness and mobilization around a "common cause" against discrimination.
Theses
The effects of gender on the trajectory of opioid painkillers in France
In France, women are the primary consumers of opioid analgesic drugs, prescribed for the treatment of pain (ANSM 2019). This observation invites us to investigate these gender differences in consumption by going beyond the pharmacological argument of an adequacy between disorder, prescription and recourse (Le Moigne 2000). Opioid analgesics raise two main issues: the treatment of pain, at the heart of the development and medical and therapeutic care; and the risks of dependence, at the heart of concerns about the uses of these drugs since the end of the 2010s with the "opioid crisis" in the United States. This sociology thesis seeks to understand how gender contributes to shaping the trajectory of opioid analgesic drugs, from pharmacology to uses, in particular through these issues of pain and the risks of dependence.
