Wokism, the facts n°23 - December 2023
Conferences and events
Intersectionality and multipositioning
In this intervention, I propose to make a reflexive return on how the multiple affiliations (in particular gender, class, professional and national status) of the researcher act on the conditions of research. Indeed, to operate the necessary process of distancing and decentering, fundamental to developing situated knowledge anchored in a strong objectivity (S. Harding), the researcher must recognize him/herself as one of the actors of the field studied, involved in many other social fields and who can live in forms of mobility and transnationalism. Just like the subjects studied, the researcher is also confronted with the processes of globalization and globalization, the international division of the intellectual labor market, the conditions of political, legal, cultural hegemony. How does this multi-positioning act in social relations during the field? How are intersectional logics taken into account in the development of knowledge?
Seminar “Literature at an Oblique” – Queer Spanish-speaking literature, between two archipelagos: Caribbean-Canary Islands
This fourth session of the seminar “Literature on the Oblique. Dissident Sexualities and Genres: Critical Issues” is dedicated to queer literatures from the Caribbean and the Canaries.
This transatlantic reflection allows us to reflect on the links between lesbian and queer literature, as well as on the possible definitions that can be given to them, based on studies of Spanish-speaking texts.
The Seminar “Gender and Authority”
The “Gender and Authority” Seminar aims to explore, from gender perspectives, questions of authority linked to the status and function of author.
Questioning the colonial legacy. Contemporary art through the prism of memory issues
Since the 1980s and the deployment of postcolonial studies in the field of contemporary art, many artists have questioned the link between the colonial past and the present. Alternately described as "historians" or "archivists", these visual artists draw on photographic archives, family stories or archival documents, the material to make or unmake History. This study day aims to question the relationships between artists and art historians by establishing a series of dialogues around the practice of the speakers and the social issues that inhabit them: memory of colonization and Independence, the role of public monuments in colonial and post-colonial history, memory of bodies and representations in the history of painting, are among the themes that will be addressed.
Decolonial and universal: crossed perspectives (Bordeaux)
This seminar is a seminar of theoretical and critical readings led by non-specialists. It is not about producing knowledge "from above", but rather about proposing reading paths in a horizontal manner. The person in charge of introducing the session presents the author, the key concepts and exciting paths for colleagues. She does not have any authority over the author. She therefore has the right to say "I don't know". The idea is to think with the authors and not against them. It will not be a question of proceeding with readings pointing out this or that flaw, but rather of trying to understand how this author can be useful to each of us, beyond our disciplines and our different fields. Decolonial is understood as a flexible concept, which could be defined as a process of freeing ourselves from the coloniality of power. Post / de / anti will be able to dialogue with each other, the essential thing being to draw theoretical constellations that can bring researchers together.
Legal discourses, gender and history
The entire ANR HLJPGenre team is very pleased to announce the holding of its first international conference. Entitled “Legal Discourses, Gender and History”, this international and multidisciplinary conference welcomes contributions linking legal discourses and gender studies, from legal disciplines as well as from all the human and social sciences. It is structured around three axes: (1) critical epistemologies of law in the light of gender and intersectionality; (2) methods of gendered and intersectional analyses, and heuristic tools developed for discourse analysis; (3) research results of gendered and intersectional analysis of legal texts, primary or secondary.
Publications
Creative Constellations – Introduction
This issue, the result of two years of work begun at the conference "Creative Constellations: Legacies and Feminine/Queer Networks", offers a reflection on the notion of "constellations", which the authors have tried to approach and define based on various corpora and methodologies - art history, literature, creation, socio-history and information and communication sciences. This approach leads to questioning certain great myths of creation: those of heritage and posterity, of the pantheon or the canon, of the center and the margin, of the objectivity of value judgments deciding which are the great works of a heritage, of the power of art and literature on society. It is a question of imagining ways of getting out of "obligatory filiations", of justifying their interest. The notion of "constellations" is thus thought of as a critical tool, a "practice", conducive to the deployment of new research methods around the works of women or queer artists. We propose a notion of constellation in itself creative: a "constellating critique", cobbled together, supported by different examples and contexts of analysis.
Gender, expression, revolution: presentation of the volume Gender and manifestos
Since the Communist Party Manifesto of 1848, the manifesto has been a favorite militant tool, thanks to its advantageous short and incisive format. In 1971, the Manifesto of the 343 paved the way for the decriminalization of abortion. In the service of feminist struggles, does the manifesto nevertheless manage to free itself from a patriarchal tradition?
Items
QUEER/LEATHER MAPPING
This scattering of productions resulting from sexual dissidence, resulting from an exclusion from the canonical cultural and literary field, explains why we claimed the fragmentary nature of this cartography that brings out very different, distant territories, sometimes difficult to access. Beyond the provisional design of this panel, what we wish to promote here is an approach of opening up to new epistemic territories. The fictional texts in this volume all date from the last ten years and function as technologies of subjectivation and queer and transfeminist sociality, as tools for social transformations, including from the academic positions that many authors also occupy.
Carl Wittman, A Gay Manifesto followed by Contre chant masqué (ed. CL Maulpoix)
"Gays need to replace a lifestyle that says, 'Apart from my sexuality, I'm just like the rest of the Americans,' with pride in their sexuality and an understanding of being looked down upon as a starting point for identifying other kinds of oppression - conscription, work, alienation, poverty, money as a higher value than people."
Little known in France, Carl Wittman's "Gay Manifesto" is one of the founding texts of American gay and queer activism, written just before the Stonewall riots in 1969. Translated into French for the first time, this radical reflection on the rise of sexual liberation movements theorizes the need for an alliance with other social struggles (civil rights, feminist, pacifist). A little over half a century later, the author and activist Cy Lecerf Maulpoix returns to the strategic importance of this text for the time and draws from it a "counter-melody", a poetic reflection on his own gay journey and the political issues that mark it.
GENDER AND SEXUALITY MINORITIES
Since the first surveys on sexual minorities appeared in France in the 1980s and 1990s, new generations of researchers have contributed to broadening the scope of research on these populations. Marked by health issues in the context of the HIV epidemic, the first surveys focused on men who have sex with men, their sexual practices and their lifestyles. More recently, the legal recognition of same-sex couples has led to the emergence of work on conjugality. Research then focused on other gender and sexual minorities and on more diverse themes. This book addresses the methodological questions raised by the emergence of gender and sexual minorities in statistical surveys and, more broadly, in the human and social sciences. Developing tools to capture specific experiences often leads to questioning the unthought-of aspects of survey techniques in terms of gender and sexuality. The small proportion of these populations, the difficulty of identifying their contours, the lack of knowledge about their distribution in the social space raise the question of their representativeness and the respect of their singularities. Based on existing surveys, the authors analyze the techniques for producing data on these social groups that are often difficult to reach. These methodological constraints require specific tools, indicators and survey devices. The reflection on categorizations aims to make visible the demographic dynamics of minority populations and more broadly to grasp the evolutions of the space of gendered and sexual possibilities.
Queer Theory and Popular Cultures: From Foucault to Cronenberg
Teresa de Lauretis, an important figure in feminist and queer theories, is known in France only through the now out-of-print first edition of this book, which brings together fundamental aspects of her thinking. De Lauretis was the first to use the term "Queer Theory". Her association with Freud, Gramsci, Foucault and Althusser allows de Lauretis to show gender as a representation constructed by social technologies as well as subjective by individuals. Based on her conceptions of gender, the author has had a strong influence on "cultural studies", particularly for cinema.
Poor Little White Boy: The Myth of Racial Dispossession
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.
Gender Transfuges – Crossing Gender Boundaries
The journeys of trans people arouse a lot of fascination. Their presence in films, books or journalistic reports is still often tinged with sensationalism. But who are the people who really free themselves from the gender category assigned to them? What are their lives like and are their lives similar? Based on an unprecedented survey of the trans population, Emmanuel Beaubatie traces the plural, complex, but nonetheless ordinary, trajectories of those who undertake to cross gender boundaries.
Sex changes do not only take place in hospitals and courts; they also take place in families, in love, at the counter, at work and in countless social interactions. Trans women or men, young or old, precarious or privileged, supported by their loved ones or isolated… all these configurations forge resolutely varied transition paths. They determine the obstacles that trans people face, but also the strategies they adopt to confront them or, failing that, to get around them. Transition is never just a question of identity; it is also accompanied by many material dimensions. For this reason, it represents above all an experience of social mobility, making trans people true “gender defectors”.
Navigating trans terrain explores the fluidity and multiplicity of gender, without ignoring the ever-renewed weight of male domination. This fascinating book invites readers to rethink gender as we know it—or rather, as we think we know it—today.
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.
