Zentrum Gender Studies, Basel (Website)
Time: 16.-17.09.2011
Venue: Basel, Switzerland
Program/PDF
The international conference “Reframing Gender, Reframing Critique” is interested in the present-day diagnostic potential of current research approaches and in broad interdisciplinary perspectives on contemporary challenges to be discussed in panels, lectures, and discussion forums. The key focus of the conference is to reevaluate to what extent our understanding of gender, gender relations and criticism needs to be reformulated or in reference to the title reframed.
Keynotes and Contributors: Lauren Berlant Chicago | Nikita Dhawan Frankfurt a.M. | Gabriele Dietze Berlin | Umut Erel London | Barbara Hobson Stockholm | Eveline Kilian Berlin | Margrit Shildrick Belfast | Lynn Staeheli Durham and others
Programme: From the beginning gender research understood itself as a critical project. It was, and still is, both a field of critical analysis of gender orders and practices and a critique of the production of knowledge about gender and of our understanding of knowledge itself. Over the course of the past years, however, the conditions and objects of research have been modified significantly. Gender relations are changing at a local and transnational level. In the context of current processes of globalization and migration, organizational forms of paid work, family and citizenship, as well as bodies, sexualities, feelings and affects, all central to gender relations, are being reconfigured in profound ways. New subjects and identities are emerging, and, at the same time, political, economic and cultural shifts and differentiations generate new sites for agency and action while at the same time producing new hierarchies and exclusions. Against this background, the responsibility of feminist criticism and critical gender research change, and so do feminist expectations. One main focus still lies on how gender, sexuality, and body are formed in text and practices. A new consideration is the question of how gender practices concur constitutively with other practices of normalization and social differentiation. Grasping these connections in a conceptual way while at the same time asking how other ways of life may be conceivable as well as livable, are some of the challenges critical Gender Studies faces at the beginning of the 21st century. These concerns offer a starting point for intensive discussion about the possibilities and challenges of critical Gender Studies today.