Wokism, the facts n°27 - June 2024
Conferences and events
Breaking Out, rethinking female prison imaginations
Editorial, curatorial and scientific news tends to reconsider the importance of a reflection on the contemporary imaginaries of prison spaces - and of the bodies and individualities that inhabit them, particularly female ones. After a period of relative invisibility of these questions following the widely disseminated work of the prison observatory and Michel Foucault in particular in the seventies, a set of events allows us to observe a transformation of the representations and imaginaries associated with the prison conditions of women.
Critical Theories and Theories of Subjectivation
On June 24, the Critical Theories and Theories of Subjectivation seminar, supervised by Estelle Ferrarese, will host: Carole Hosteing, PhD student in philosophy at CURAPP-ESS, from 14:15 p.m. to 30:16 p.m. for a presentation entitled "Michèle le Doeuff and feminist epistemologies"; and Hourya Bentouhami, lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Toulouse-Jean-Jaurès (Inspé), from 18:XNUMX p.m. to XNUMX:XNUMX p.m. for a presentation entitled "Marxism and intersectionality: what social theory?"
Discussion led by Salima Naït Ahmed, ATER in political science at the University of Reims Champagne Ardenne and member of CURAPP-ESS.
Feminisms and international solidarity
The 2000s were marked by the renewal of the feminist movement (both nationally and internationally). Described as the "third wave" or "postfeminism", it brought new demands and was imbued with the spread of intersectional, queer, trans-identitarian and even postcolonial analyses. It affirmed intersections with anti-racism, anti-capitalism, alter-globalization and ecology. Should we then more than ever think of feminism in the plural? What links, what legacies can we read there with so-called 2nd wave feminism? Is what is affirmed of plural, fluid identities opposing a homogenizing approach of a "we, women", simply a matter of generation? Does this oppose a convergence of struggles or can a form of unity in diversity emerge from it? And how can we think about international solidarity, the convergence of struggles beyond national borders in a context where the rights of women and sexual and gender minorities are denied in authoritarian states, attacked in democracies taking an illiberal turn but also in large democracies. To varying and unequal degrees depending on the regimes in place, the effects on public freedoms are indeed numerous: restrictions on access to abortion, abandonment of measures to combat domestic violence and violence against women and gender minorities, attacks on feminist movements and gender studies, bans on same-sex marriage, anti-LGBTQI+ mobilizations. What are the anti-feminist and anti-gender strategies in states that attack the rights of women and queer people? How do feminists (whether activists, journalists, lawyers, academics) resist in these contexts? To what extent can the international solidarity of feminist movements be activated? This new edition of the DIU Gender Studies summer academy proposes to exchange and debate around these questions by crossing perspectives between research and activism.
(Re)saying gender. CoDiTex Network study day
This study day of the network of CoDiTex (Corpus–Discourse–Texts) research centers, teams and units aims to analyze the way in which speakers, through their discursive operations, designate entities whose gender identity evolves or changes with the effect of a change of designation, which can be translated in particular by a modification of the grammatical gender. This question is currently very much debated both from the (meta-)linguistic point of view, where it is a question of articulating the grammatical category of gender based on the distribution of nouns into two or three classes (masculine, feminine, neutral), as in the field of "gender studies" which aims at identity gendered conceived as a political and social construction of sexual difference.
(Re)saying gender can be understood as the way of reporting and representing entities, which involves the three dimensions: referential, discursive and textual of such operations; but can also be understood as a revision of a "grammatical organization" in the light of the developments that characterize our societies, and which cannot remain without influence on the linguistic system. This last problematic field raises the question of examining the way in which "normative consciousness" also operates, in terms of "popular linguistics", by "linguistic feeling".
But this articulation of kinds takes on another dimension when linguistics is interested in these developments as they are actualized not only in text and discourse, but also in various textual-discursive genres, whether they are factual or fictional. The question of the choice and treatment of corpora, which is one of the foundations of the grouping within CoDiTex, will thus be taken up again for this day from the angle of the diversity of genres of texts-discourses. This study day offers an initial exploration of the issues related to the gender from literary corpora.
Workshop “From gendered crimes to femicide: a continuum of gender violence? (1650-1850)”
Workshop organized by Cathy McClive (Collegium of Lyon, Florida State University), Margot Giacinti (Triangle) and Anne Verjus (Triangle).
Program
JUNE 20 afternoon (14 p.m.-18 p.m.)
Introduction to the framework and methodology of the day
- 1. ' Sex crimes "( Cathy McClive, Collegium de Lyon, Florida State University)
- 2. ' Is parricide a gender murder? » (Julien Doyon, LARHRA, ULL2)
JUNE 21 morning (9 a.m.-13 p.m.)
- 3. ' Is it the person or the marriage that kills? "(Anne Verjus, CNRS)
- 4. ' Are heinous crimes also femicides? "(Margot Giacinti, Triangle)
Speakers: Juliette Zanetta (ULL2), Fanny Tricot (Framespa, University of Toulouse 2)
Global French Studies: Transnational, Transcultural, and Transdisciplinary Perspectives (Melbourne)
Global French Studies within or across different time periods (from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century) – Decentring and decolonizing French Studies – Transnational and transcultural movements – Transdisciplinary approaches to French Studies. – Local, national, global perspectives. – Borders, boundaries, margins. – Postcolonialism and empire – Migration, exile, displacement, diaspora. – Indigenous populations. – History and memory – Global responses to climate change – Gender, sexuality, queerness – Media and technology in the French-speaking world – World literature in French / literature-monde en français – Translation and interpreting – Monolingual, multilingual, translingual environments – Diversity and equity in French-speaking institutions – Teaching in the Global French Studies classroom
Calls for contributions
Historicizing the “I”
The problematic positioning of the philosophers of the Enlightenment has been the subject of several recent works. If, in De l'esprit des lois (1748), Montesquieu ridicules the arguments of the slaveholders and if, in Candid (1759), Voltaire denounces the barbaric methods linked to slavery, it is true that their defense of freedom seems to have as its main subject a white man, at the expense of the "minoritized" subjects that are women and non-Europeans - among others.
Creations and arts through the prism of the redefinition of Europe's commitment to its margins, from the margins to Europe
The proposals may fall within one of the following areas:
• (De)construction of the concept of commitment
• (De)construction of artistic genres and aesthetic forms
• (De)construction of intercultural dialogue in a context of uprooting/re-rooting, de-/reterritorialization
• (De)construction of (supra)national identity
• Cultural transfers and reinvention of engagement
Against I: Gender and Minority Enunciations in Literature
No need to go back to the 19th century novele century, nor to limit oneself to the words of current sex workers in order to see or hear the expression of a “counter-I” whose dominant discourse defines the “paradoxical” conditions of existence – in the etymological sense of despite (para, “against”), glory (doxa, “opinion”). The notions of “diversity” and “representation” are now at the heart of public debate, particularly on social networks, and are the subject of new demands from younger readers. The concept of “own voice” (“their own voice” or “authentic voice”), formulated on Twitter in 2015 by the author Corinne Duyvis, is used in particular to identify and promote works for which the author and his or her character(s) share the same “minoritized” identity – in terms of gender, class and race, but also sexuality, culture, religion or disability. Initially conceived as a tool – and hashtag – of reading recommendations within the #WeNeedDiverseBooks digital campaign or, more broadly, in the directories of “diverse” fiction, its use has since expanded to become a label marketing « tote " in the book industry - which does not go without raising questions about the imprecision of the expression or about uncomfortable and potentially dangerous situations, not only for the authors (coming out forced, for example), but also for its "tokenizing" excesses (quota policy) in certain publishing houses and collections. Furthermore, the widespread tendency to read the writings and productions of racialized subjects as necessarily autobiographical, as if they were testimonies with sociological or documentary value (from Faïza Guène to African-American poetry via rap!), clearly indicates the difficulty for the latter to inhabit the "I" of fiction in the same way as other writers. The literary and political questions raised by this editorial moment are inscribed in certain works themselves: in Yellowface (2023), the assumption of the enunciative instance by an unsympathetic and unreliable narrator allows Rebecca F. Kuang to question the idea of an objective standard of authenticity to which contemporary writers should conform, and to interrogate the stories that each of them would be authorized or not to (d)escribe.
Confluences of social inequalities in the media and literature of the French-speaking area and the world: intersectionality from the point of view of literary studies (review Interférences litteraires/literaire interferenties)
Confluences of social inequalities in the media and literature of the French-speaking world and the world:
intersectionality from a literary studies perspective
The concept of intersectionality is particularly conducive to a reassessment of the interweaving of power relations between the past and the present. Born from the observation of the existence of multiple discriminations in society, its origins date back to Black Feminism in the 1970s, which takes into account the interdependencies between racism and sexism in society. This term, which was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), is inspired by the visual metaphor of the intersection of streets. Since then, the notion of intersectionality describes different forms of multiple discrimination in society. In addition to the categories of race, class and gender, other criteria of social difference and diversity, such as religion or disability, have been added. As Winker/Degele point out in 2009, intersectionality is a 'rather rudimentarily developed theoretical approach' (11), which has only recently been taken into account in literary studies (cf. Krass 2014: 17; cf. Klein/Schnicke 2014). While feminist studies, gender studies or postcolonial studies, considered separately, have now established themselves as reference theoretical approaches in literary studies, they are less often found applied in their intersectional imbrication.
European Ecofeminisms
In this conference we propose to study European ecofeminisms. Several variants of ecofeminism can be examined: a literary and cultural ecofeminism, which is based on an ethics of " which » (ethics of care), another more social and political, to show through literary works, the social domination that weighs on women, an aesthetic and artistic aspect, like the Icelandic feminist activist performers, Love Icelandic Corporation, who deconstruct in videos and performances, gender codes and current environmental excesses. Particular attention will be paid to subjects developing attention to ecological and environmental issues as well as to the development of feminist demands. This conference aims to make a diversity of feminist and feminine voices heard, to take into account cultural differences, to highlight the representation of the modes of oppression of women and to show the solutions envisaged in renewed literary and cultural scenarios, in/through a new ecological conscience.
Publications
Emotional work in research on gender-based violence. Crossed perspectives on an unthought-of issue in the academic world
Based on a cross-examination between doctoral students and their thesis supervisor, the authors propose a theoretical and empirical reflection on the ethical question of emotional labor underlying research on gender-based violence. These have costs that are an integral part of each of the stages implemented in the research. However, this emotional labor is very little thought about and a fortiori supported by institutions. After defining emotional labor, the article focuses on the different costs borne by researchers at each stage of the investigation. It then shows that emotional labor leads the authors to redefine interpersonal relationships, which take on an even more important place when academic systems are (almost) non-existent. Based on the authors' research and supervision experiences, their personal and collective reflections, the article gives food for thought on this emotional labor, contributes to making it visible, and suggests ways of supporting, tools, and institutionalized systems that could be put in place. Ultimately, the article concludes with the idea that despite its different costs, emotional work is heuristic and involves strong political dimensions that contribute to the production of knowledge.
Francophone literary scene and postcolonial perspectives: some reflections
Defined as a multidisciplinary field of study that examines and dissects power relations, postcolonial studies aim to critique the nature of the relationships between the colonized and the colonizer. This wave of writing that tends to deconstruct binary representations is not limited to thought. Indeed, we are also witnessing the emergence of a literature that seeks to affirm the power of the colonized to act and to dispose of themselves by giving them back the voice that has been confiscated from them until then. It therefore consists of an exercise in shifting the perspective on History. It is also intended to reappropriate and restore a divided and alienated identity. This merit of overcoming the aporias of History is accompanied by the (re)questioning of several issues, in particular the aesthetics of the novel and particularly language and identity.
Existing. For an embodied feminist philosophy
Putting back on the agenda topics traditionally ignored by Western philosophy: this is the mandate given to this essay written by four hands by feminist philosophers. They reveal the dynamics of domination at work in classical concepts such as reason, justice or autonomy, and call into question the so-called universal subject. Exploring a philosophy of the everyday, anchored in sensory experience, the authors trace multiple paths towards another political subjectivity. Thus is constructed a thought that is at once critical, vulnerable and embodied, which echoes the great ideas that cross a field in full effervescence.
Several female theorists are featured here, including Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Kristie Dotson, Camille Froidevaux-Metterie, Emilie Hache, Patricia Hill Collins, Monique Wittig and Iris Marion Young.
Summary
Introduction: Breaking down the barriers of philosophy
A multidimensional subjectivity: putting an end to the universal Subject
Beyond dualisms: towards embodied and vulnerable subjects
Care: towards relational and caring subjects
Naturalness and coloniality: towards subjects anchored in nature
Learning to defend yourself: towards safe subjects
Epistemic justice: towards credible, heard and recognized subjects
Conclusion
Items
For an epistemological interpretation of feminist literatures
With the historical and literary essay Women and style. For a feminist gaze (Divergences, 2023), published alongside a thesis entitled Ernest Renan: natural sciences and historical thought (Honoré Champion, 2023), Azélie Fayolle joins the effort to claim the creative power of women's texts since the premodern era. She aligns herself with the work of Martine Reid, Éliane Viennot and Jennifer Tamas, among other contemporary French researchers and essayists, to highlight the literary authority and innovation that women authors, from the dawn of the Ancien Régime, have opposed to the sprawling constraints of patriarchy.
2To be exact, Fayolle does more than rehabilitate the literary work of women, mostly European and American, and in particular since the XNUMXth century.e century. She proposes to start from "an intuition" (p. 11) to dare a bet: to theorize a feminist style, which would be protean, vehement and subversive from a social as well as literary point of view. For Fayolle, it is "the common condition of women and the intersection of their sometimes multiple oppressions", as well as "the singularity of their journey", which explain that they share "certain characteristics of their books" (Idem). Feminist styles, which Fayolle groups together under the term feminist gaze, or feminist perspective, includes any literary, poetic, theoretical and/or philosophical approach, opposing "a response, conscious or not, to patriarchal oppression" (Idem). Fayolle takes the feminine gaze as Iris Brey defines it further, since she is more specifically interested in the "politicization" and "collective narratives" (p. 31) permitted by the feminist gaze.
Patriarchy, the end of a world
Judith Godrèche's words exploded like a bomb in a milieu that had been frozen in denial until then. They expressed disbelief in the face of silence and the hope that victims of sexual violence would finally be listened to. But we know that indignation is fleeting. Faced with the risk of a return to inertia and in an alarming political context, feminists must maintain and strengthen the momentum with which they have undertaken to refuse the assignment of
women to their bodies as objects. Because today it is a deep-rooted aspiration to overthrow the patriarchal order of the world that we carry.
The experience of oppression
Oppression is the limitation of an experience, the assignment of a body. Oppression presupposes the subject on which it is exercised; it is suffocation only by being unbearable. If the experience of oppression prepares a possible resistance, it is because it is paradoxical from the outset.
By showing that oppression inseparably characterizes objective social violence and the way in which it is singularly perceived, experienced and signified, this book seeks to think of oppression in terms of lived experience. In order to elucidate how it affects bodies, intersubjective relationships or relations to temporality and lived space, the work deploys a phenomenology going to the heart of the objective and the subjective, of social relationships and ordinary experiences.
Bringing together the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon with the texts of Richard Wright and contemporary feminist thought, the author uncovers certain typical dimensions of the experience of oppression and opens a new way to conceptualize experience, subjectivity and bodies as they are traversed by sexism and racism. But the analysis does not simply focus on the dispossessions and blockages caused by oppression: it considers experience in its possibilities and futures, opening the way to a phenomenology of political resistance.
