09:30 – 11:00: Session 8: Gender and Identity
Women’s Lived Bodies in Contemporary Feminist Politics of Difference: Reiteration and Reconfiguration
Li-Ning Chen – University of Essex, UK
Situating in the context of the politics of difference, this paper aims to articulate a feminist politics of embodiment in relation to women’s heterogeneous gendering experiences. Interweaving Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological lived body with Judith Butler’s idea of gender performativity, I will argue that the interdependency between the discursive power of gender structures and the corporeal mastery of the lived body, signals how female embodiments of social differences can pluralize feminist politics. I will unfold the above argument through three aspects: the corporeal reiteration of gender performativity, the discursive reconfiguration of gender performativity, and the politicization of discursive reconfiguration. The first two sections will concentrate on elucidating the relational dialect between corporeal reiteration and discursive reconfiguration: While gender structure constraints and conditions individual actions, the performative bodily act with inherent individuality also contributes to the development of discursive effects of the existed gender structures with alternative interpretation. Such contribution has transformative merits, which may not exhibits drastic effects immediately, but can be potentially reiterated, even be developed further, by future gendered corporeal practices.
Following that, I will bring Zerilli’s account of ‘symbolic mother’ into play, to illustrate how the symbolic corporeal practice of reiterating discursive reconfiguration works. I will further suggest that it is a manifestation of feminist politics of discursive embodiment, in which a political relational dialect of reiteration and reconfiguration occurs, on the one hand, between the discourse and the materiality of gender; and on the other hand, between agonistic interlocutors of women. By linking the symbolic practices of reiteration and reconfiguration with the idea of the lived body, a feminist politics of embodiment can be articulated, in which demonstrating how the interaction between sexual differences and other social differences can enrich feminist deliberations.
Queering the Regulation of Sex/Gender and the Gender Recognition Act 2004
Flora Renz – University of Kent, UK
The Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) was part of a variety of neo-liberal legislation introduced to extend access to legal rights and protection to LGBT people. Combined with the Civil Partnership Act it brings gender identity and the change thereof within the ambit of legislative control and regulation. The GRA aims to define gender as exclusively binary and fixed rather than fluid. I will suggest that as a result the GRA is simply not capable of accommodating the often far messier realities of people’s actual lives and their gender identities.
I will suggest that using Foucault’s notion of governmentality, as expanded on by Rose and Miller, can help problematise and question some of the normative concepts underpinning of the GRA. While the GRA is undoubtedly a positive development compared to previous case law, it nevertheless enforces a strong normative definition of sex/gender as purely binary and requires applicants to annul their pre-existing relationships and to “commit” to living in one gender for life. As a result rights, such as access to marriage and civil partnerships, are only granted to those who chose to regulate themselves and their bodies in certain ways and who are willing and able to submit themselves to intense regimes of control that are not just expressed in law but also in medical and psychiatric discourses around gender identity.
This regulatory approach to sex/gender is increasingly at odds with queer (re)constructions of sex/gender as non-binary, fluid and performative. Drawing on the work of theorists such as Butler and Bornstein I will use queer theory and initial findings from my field work to highlight the limits of the regulation of identities and life paths in particular in regards to transgender people’s decision making process and life choices.
The Love in My Being
Valerie Bouchard – Laval University & Université du Québec, Canada
Laudan Vaezmir
“I killed love in my being, I will never fall in love”, confides Negar, a cured and corrected version of Ali Askar, to the BBC camera. She is one of the many diagnosed transsexuals whose sex reassignment has been approved by the Iranian National Legal Medical Board and whose reassignment surgery (SRS) has been subsidised by the state, the same state that has reduced or removed all essential subsidies.
Iran ranks second in the world for the number of SRS it performs. In a country where homosexuality is a travesty against God, a disruption of the desired social order, and a crime with the price tag of a death sentence, SRS has become the state’s policy for eradication of distinct groups whose literal existence is denied in the first place. A fatwa issued by Khemeiny has paved the way for the legalisation of SRS. A judge’s discretion can allow a condemned homosexual to avoid execution by opting for a sex change. Likewise, a doctor’s status entitles him to diagnose TS (transsexual) individuals and to correct nature’s ‘mistakes’. Genocide is in making. A genocide where the State, the religious powers, the rigid social norms, the judicial system and the health care system all go hand-in-hand to persecute and eradicate specific groups. A case of identity genocide can be traced.
Applying Michel Foucault’s theories developed in his book Discipline and Punish, we explore how the chastised and transformed body of the transsexual is where the power dynamic of the penal justice is exercised to mark social reprobation. The torment exercised upon the body is taken further by the erosion of the criminal’s’ identity.
The social, governmental, judicial and medical structure around SRS, allows not only the elimination of homosexuality and all kinds of ultra-normative gender identities, but also it reinforces gender binary segregation by correcting any diversions. After all, the Iranian situation is only an extreme example and a magnifying mirror of the same problems in the West where the facade of the acceptance of transsexuality serves predominantly as the greatest identity-normalizing tool.
Additional Comments: Debates surrounding Foucault’s writings on the Iranian revolution make the application of his theories to the Iranian situation even more interesting. In this paper we seize the occasion to apply Foucault’s “theory of the author” where he criticizes the notion of the “aura” or the style of the author. Arguing that the author’s work tends to manifest itself in form of a unified thought that only requires application. However, this unity depends solely on the artificial corpus that we create by selecting what is worth among the author’s works and what needs to be discarded as an abnormality.
11:00- 11:30: Coffee break
11:30 – 13:00: Session 9: Sexuality and Thinking Sexual Difference
The Influence of the Forensic-Psychiatric Discourse on the Existence of Sexual Identities: Some Assumptions and Critical Reflections
Werner Leys – CEVI, Forensic Psychotherapist, PC Sint-Jan-Baptist, Belgium
In the great field of tension between a normative discourse which is often repressive and restrictive and the (neo) liberal open mindedness the forensic-psychiatric discourse plays a tremendous role, and has great influence on it.
Throughout history the forensic-psychiatric discourse paid a lot of attention to sexual diversity, mostly in an attempt to distinguish them from “normality”.In this presentation I would like to take a closer look at the psychiatrisation and criminalization on the existence of sexual diversity. Starting from a clinical vignette on fetishism I will argue that the forensic –psychiatric discourse of deviant forms of sexual behavior is problematic an sich. After all, where both fields come together (forensic and psychiatric) some confusion may arise. Sexual diversity may be conceived more as a social rather than a medical concept.
In a second clinical vignette about a case of fistfucking I will argue that we sometimes have to criminalize the way people are using pornography. According to Foucault in our modern or postmodern society there is a will to knowledge, we want detailed information about sexuality to develop our knowledge. Nonstop imagery, capturing sexuality in pictures, photographs, movies is a part of sexuality, it is in there we find information about the hidden, the boundaries, but not everything can be seen. As Baudrillard is arguing, sexuality may be emptied of all meaning, we are still left with our fascination, our expectation that there are more limits to be exceeded and that search must continue but… at the expense of? Research showed us that there is a link between porn use and sex offending in case where the person was already likely to offend.
On the other hand criminalizing things can become dangerous as well, because it can create a generalized anxiety as well.
‘Sexual Perversion’ and Moral Psychology
Peter Caven – The University of Sheffield, UK
Whilst some philosophers have attempted to provide an analysis of the concept of sexual perversion which justifies conceiving of certain sexual practices as morally problematic on the basis of their supposed perversity, others have urged that we divorce the term from its moral connotations, or even suggest that it is inapplicable concept and should be discarded from contemporary usage. Nonetheless, even amongst those who advocate a maximally liberal attitude to sex, there persists a tendency to morally condemn certain types of sexual practice, such as incest, even when engaged with between fully informed and consenting adults. It seems that there a lingering intuitive appeal to the claim that such ‘perverse’ sex is morally wrong purely on the grounds of its supposed unnatural nature, which cannot be easily reconciled with a liberal approach to sexual morality.
In this paper, I argue that we can better understand and evaluate the deep seated human tendency to judge certain sexual acts as perverse and morally wrong by appealing to empirically informed moral psychology. I first briefly analyse the concept of sexual perversion and suggest that it cannot be applied within a non-teleological, naturalistic world view. Next I contend that recent evidence from moral psychology imply that much of the moral condemnation of various sexual practices is motivated by a set of automatic, affect-based intuitions, and that for the most part the justifications people offer for their condemnation of sexual ‘perversions’ are mere post-hoc rationalisations of an intuitive gut response. Finally, I discuss the case for and against the claim that this insight undermines any form of specifically sexual morality, concluding that it does so only insofar as we are widely committed to prioritising certain affect based moral intuitions at the expense of others.
Poly Politics: Problems and Possibilities for Sexual Rights Claims
Lisa Poole – Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada
Polyamory, or “poly,” is loosely defined as the practice of respectful, responsible, and consensual non-monogamy. As an emergent form of kinship, polyamory is developing into a real social practice with an expanding “community” and increasing media exposure. Polyamory is “‘coming out of the closet’ as an interest group with a political agenda” (Strassberg, 2003). In this regard, Kirkman (2010) says, “poly is the new gay.” However, sexual political struggles leave legacies “in the form of laws, social practices, and ideologies” which continue to affect the way in which sexuality is experienced (Rubin, 1984, p. 274). Given the legacy of “gay politics,” if much of the struggle against institutionalized normative heterosexuality now resides in the field of right claims (Brown, 2000; Seidman, 2009), what are the problems and possibilities of this for “poly politics”? It will take a radical reformation and renegotiation of sexual politics to resist the legal regulatory framework of rights claims.
13:00 – 14:00: Lunch break
14.00 – 15:00: Session 10: Sexuality, Policing and Rights
Spank the Nation: Sexual Politicking and Sex Policing in the Age of “Crisis”
Aspa Chalkidou – University of Aegean, Greece
The aim of this paper is a critical analytical approach of public and formal national discourse about non normative sexualities. More specifically, through the paradigm of bdsm I’ ll try to show how the dominant discourse uses the metaphor of sexual (ab)normality in order to nominate and proclaim what should be considered not only as the sexual norm, but also as the yard-stick of political, economical, and national normality.
In Greece, sadism and masochism appears in public discourse through the inclusion of sexual paraphilias in the new Regulation Assessment for the Grade of Disability of Ministry of Employment and Social Security. Media frenzy caused by this inclusion presented sadomasochism as a sexuality that is supposed to imply not only a sexual /moral “disease” but also an economical “disease” which threatens the benefits alloted by the public health system to people with “special needs”.
Additionally, it is important to insist on the intersection of sexuality, nation, citizenship, and socioeconomic/political systems. In the age of financial Crisis, bdsm is a widespread mark of danger in the Greek public imaginary; only this time bdsm goes against “the integrity and well being of the nation”. Using bdsm iconography and terminology as a metaphor for the political debates between Greek government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as well as between Greek prime minister Antonis Samaras and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, bdsm is reconstructed as a synonym for anti-Greek ideology and is especially connected with specific political systems (totalitarian regimes) and nationalized meanings (German National Socialism).
This analysis attempts to trace the ways in which political discourse maps its meanings on bdsm in terms of sex and sexuality. How does public discourse appropriate and usurp non normative sexualities? In what ways do medicalized and nationalized dominant discourses use non normative sexualities in order to establish and stabilize new forms of nationalism? What kind of contributions can we gain from critical sexuality studies?
Liberating Children’s Sexuality: A History of Paedophile Activism
Noëmi Willemen – Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
My research focuses on the (scientific) construction of today’s ultimate sexual other: the paedophile. Towards the end of the so called sexual revolution in the West (mid 1970s), the child lover was progressively identified by paedophile factions as a distinct category of sexual deviant that required its proper battle for sexual freedom, a development further urged by the emancipation of homosexuality from the catalogue of psychiatric illnesses in 1973 (Hekma, 2004). Paedophile activist groups shared three main goals: providing support systems for isolated childlovers, educating the public by challenging myths and political action aimed at depsychiatrisation, decriminalisation and destigmatisation of intergenerational sexuality(Plummer, 1981). Paedophile groups like Kinderbefreiungsfront (Germany), Paedofil Gruppe (Denmark), Pedophile Information Exchange (UK), Childhood Sensuality Circle (USA) and others formed international alliances, spread pamphlets and organised conferences. These exchanges could be regarded as a first step in the construction of a somewhat collective paedophile identity, but the glory days of the paedophile movement were short-lived (Schult, 1980, Gamson, 1994 & Angelides, 2005).
I propose a brief overview of the history of the Dutch-speaking paedophile movement, namely the paedophile wing of the leading Dutch movement for sexual reform (NVSH), the work and study groups(Amsterdam, Roermond, Nijmegen) on paedophilia, and their Belgian counterparts, who were active in Ghent and Antwerp. Also, I will present a discourse analysis of written sources gathered from the Suzan Daniel Foundation (AMSAB, Ghent) and the Edward Brongersma Foundation (IISG, Amsterdam). How did these activists construct the adult, the child and consent in their arguments for the decriminalisation of adult sexual interactions with children in a time where child sexual abuse was not a major issue? How did they articulate their own counter-discourse to the labels they were given by medical, legal and media discourses? Finally, how did they position themselves with regard to other advocates for the liberation of nonhetero-sexualities?
Bibliography
Angelides, S. (2005). The Emergence of the Paedophile in the Late TwentiethCentury, in: Australian Historical Studies, 126.
Gamson, J. (1997). Messages of Exclusion: Gender, Movements and SymbolicBoundaries, in: Gender & Society.
Hekma, G. (2004). Homoseksualiteit in Nederland van 1730 tot de Moderne Tijd. Meulenhoff. Amsterdam.
Plummer, K. (1981). The Paedophile’s Progress: a View from Below in B.Taylor (ed.) Perspectives on Paedophilia. Batsford Academic and EducationalLtd. London.
Schult, P. (1980). Die Pädophilie- Bewegung in Westdeutschland. Rückblick und Perspektiven in: J.S. Hohmann (ed.) Pädophilie Heute. Foerster Verlag. Frankfurt-Berlin.
Weeks, J. (1985). Sexuality and its Discontents. Meaning, Myths and ModernSexualities. Routledge. New York.
15:00 – 15:30: Coffee break
15:30 – 17:00: Closing Plenary
