Leuven Lectures and Interfaculty Seminars on Gender

Doctoral Schools for the Humanities and the Social Sciences
 

1. Prof. Barbara Duden (Leibniz Universität Hannover) June 13- 14
 

General lecture (13th June, 18:00):  Current concepts in feminism – LETT 08.16

Doctoral seminar (14th June, 10:00-13:00): The Appropriateness/Inappropriateness of our current concepts in feminism – SW 00.113

Barbara Duden, currently professor of at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Hannover, became one of the pioneers of the history of the body with the publication of her 1987 monograph Geschichte unter der Haut. Ein Eisenacher Arzt und seine Patientinnen um 1730 (The Woman Beneath the Skin. A Doctor's Patients in Eighteenth Century Germany, Harvard University Press 1998). In this study she convincingly demonstrated that the most basic biological and medical terms we use to describe our own bodies--male/female, healthy/sick--are in fact cultural constructions. Barbara Duden has since then written and edited numerous books on the history of scientific observation and intuition of the body and on the contingency of somatic experience: Body History, a Repertory. / Körpergeschichte, ein Repertorium. (Wolfenbüttel 1990), Disembodying Women. Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn (Harvard 1993), Anatomie der guten Hoffnung. Bilder vom ungeborenen Menschen 1500-1800 (Stuttgart 1996), Die Gene im Kopf - der Fötus im Bauch. Historisches zum Frauenkörper (Hannover 2002).
 

Venue:

- Lecture: Arts Faculty (room 08.16), Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 Leuven,

- Seminar: Faculty of Social Sciences (room SW00.113), Parkstraat 45, Leuven.

2. Prof. Cordelia Fine (University of Melbourne) September 19-20

General Lecture (19th September, 18:00): "Women and Men are from Earth: The real science of sex differences" – Aud. Michotte; PSI 91.93

 

Doctoral Seminar (20th September, 10:00-13:00): Is there ‘neurosexism’ in functional neuroimaging investigations of sex differences’? - tba
 

Cordelia Fine is a cognitive neuroscientist who is sceptical of neuropsychological theories that claim to prove that men's and women's brains are intrinsically different. She studied experimental psychology at Oxford University, criminology at Cambridge University and cognitive neuroscience in London and is currently ARC Future Fellow in Psychological Sciences and Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne. In her research she aims to lay bare the developmental path that is constructed, step by step, out of the continuous and dynamic interaction between brain, genes and environment. Among her numerous publications are: A Mind of its Own. How your Brain Distorts and Deceives (Norton 2008), Delusions of Gender. How our Mind, Society and Neurosexism Create Differences (Norton 2010), "From scanner to soundbite: Issues in interpreting and reporting sex differences in the brain", Current Directions in Psychological Science 19: 280-283 (2010); "Will working mothers' brains explode? The popular new genre of neurosexism", Neuroethics 1 (1): 69-72 (2008)

 

Venue:

- Lecture: Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (room 91.93), Tiensestraat 102, Leuven

- Seminar: tb

3. Prof. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Columbia University) September 24-25

Doctoral seminar (24th September, 13:00-16:00): Ethics and Politics- STUK 02.C004

General lecture (25th September, 18:00): Postcolonialism Today – MSI 02.08

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor at the Institute for Comparative Literature of Columbia University,. Her areas of interest are 19th- and 20th-century literature, Marxism, feminism, globalization, deconstruction and poststructuralism, Her work offers a rigorous and unflinching scrutiny of the so-called truths of Western capitalist discourse and what it marginalises or leaves behind. Spivak is most of all associated with postcolonialism. Throughout her oeuvre she has dealt with cultural imperialism and its creation of the subaltern, something which she pursues with a rare consistency, a strong sense of critique for political or institutional appropriation and a keen eye for the irreducible hybridity of language. The fundamental undecidability of meaning already came to the fore in Spivak’s translation of and preface to Derrida’s seminal Of Grammatology in 1976. Among her best-known publications are: "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg, eds. Marxism and the interpretation of Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press (1988); In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987); Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993); Death of a Discipline (2003); An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012). In 2012 she was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Thought and Ethics.

 

Venue:

- Lecture: STUK, room 02.C004, Naamsestraat 96, Leuven

- Seminar: Arts Faculty, MSI 02.08, Erasmusplein 2, Leuven

First Italian Femme Conference - Gendererotica 2013: Contaminations of Queer Art

Rome, June 2013

International Festival Hosted by Eyes Wild Drag

Call for Abstracts

Femme is a term used by many in the queer community who identify as "feminine." Defining unequivocally who is femme (or fem in Italian usage) or what it means exactly is not an easy matter, given that it can be – and is – always interpreted differently. More importantly, femme is perceived, expressed and used in a wide variety of ways, both by people who identify as femme and in literature across the globe.

The meanings and interpretations of femme also morph with respect to the intersections of other identities, such as the "class," "race" and "size" of the femme body. For this reason, every community and every individual, every lesbian, trans or genderqueer person, can be a vehicle for new and subjective redefinitions of a femme identity, that in their fluid and heterogeneous ways remain strongly connected to a queer identity while presenting themselves as distinctly "feminine."

But if femininity and the values associated with femininity – how a feminine woman "should be" and what she should represent – are social constructs that depend on the power of the male gaze, femmes also upset the stereotypes by masterfully playing with them, subverting categories and definitions by using them outside of their socially accepted norms in the dominant culture.

 

Femme is also a concept with a strong political imperative. It is manifested all around the world through art, political organizing, academic disciplines, fashion and media in order to counter its invisibility and the negative connotations often assigned to it (tied to mainstream culture’s view of femininity). From Germany to the U.S., from Canada to Australia, movements are born, festivals, events and conferences that create a strong activist community to resist the marginalization that femmes often experience, even within LGBTQI communities.

Given these assumptions, the first Italian Femme Conference aims to develop deeper reflections on the femme identity, its relationship to queer theory, its many modes of expression, its battles and resistances to heteronormativity and normative femininity, which are, to say the least, restrictive and confining. Although artists and performers all over the world are actively spreading and developing subversive femme culture, here in Italy the phenomenon is still relatively new. Joining the traditions of international Femme conferences (www.femme2012.com and www.femmeguild.com), the first femme conference in Italy hopes to promote the interactions, testimonies and dissemination of diverse and intergenerational points of view on a subject that has yet to be deepened and expanded upon in Italy. In this way, we hope to contribute to increased visibility of femme identities in the overall struggle to resist categories, dichotomies and assigned genders.