Event overview
A one-day conference organised by the Gender, Sexuality and Violence Research Network and funded by the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts in South East England
Keynote
‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!’: Debility, Capacity, Disability
Professor Jasbir Puar, Rutgers University
How might logics of militarism, patriarchy and heteronormativity be enmeshed and interdependent? By the same token, how might feminist, queer and pacifist politics draw on each other in the struggle for equality and against war? How do cultural representations in the media, art and literature shape and normalise such heteronormative practices? In thinking through the potential tensions and alliances between these ideologies, this conference seeks to reconsider the relations between gender, sexuality and violence.
Twentieth and twenty-first century Western norms have largely centred on the fantasy of hegemonic masculinity as the only subject able to manifest ‘control’, a subject that has given flesh to the nationalist ideals of sovereignty and self-determination. Women, queer identities, colonial subjects, and enemies in wartime have often been subordinated within this model of the body politic. These excluded subjects must be managed to maintain a social order grounded in the privileging of white, heterosexual, militarised masculinity.
Yet how might these norms be put under strain by the conflicts they are cultivated to support, or by political struggle? What of the claims made by these excluded subjects, and the new modes of representation they generate? What of the wounded male body – does this challenge or simply re-coup the status quo? If the exposure to violence is unevenly distributed through the categories of race and social class, do we need to interrogate the broad concept of hegemonic masculinity? What are the linkages between periods of national crisis and the pathologising of sexuality? What are the conditions of the masculinist revival perhaps most visible currently in the United States? Moreover, what of female or LGBTQ militancy? How might we re-think subjectivity, vulnerability and violence in order to contest structures of power?
Join us on the 30th September for a day-long conference at Goldsmiths to discuss the politics of gender, sexuality and violence. Lunch will be provided.
Further Information and Full Programme
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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30 Sep 2017 | 9:00am - 7:30pm |
Accessibility
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