The 9th Annual ROLES Conference took place in May 2019, featuring speakers across six panels. Highlights included a paper on the narratives of adult children with LGBTQ parents and the representation of Iranian Muslim women in photography. Scroll down to view all of the abstracts from ROLES Conference 9.
Keynote
Gemma Commane (Birmingham City University) – Kinktrepreneurship: BDSM, Kink and the Creative Industries
In this keynote, I introduce the term ‘Kinktrepreneurship’ and consider what this frame might mean in repositioning the Professional Dominatrix as ‘entrepreneur’ within discussions on (unconventional) entrepreneurship. The paper will explore Kinktrepreneurship and the Professional Dominatrix, with a specific focus on visibility, entrepreneurial pursuits and the importance of self-representation. The keynote is based on a new proposed intellectual project (submission of the research bid is imminent), and I will be discussing how ‘Kinktrepreneurship’ and the ‘Kinktrepreneur’ can enable us to seriously focus on a marginalised group with a set of industrial practices, which are situated in wider social and cultural politics. These kinky contexts are not readily included in contemporary discussions of entrepreneurship and the enterprising woman (Kirby 2003, Chell, 2008, Grandy and Mavin 2011, Naudin 2018, Duffy and Hund 2015, Loaker 2013, Grey 2003, Nicholls and Cho 2006, and others). This absence potentially further marginalises and misrepresents other forms of valid entrepreneurship that are already existing within the creative industries and sexual economies. The distinct gap in academic work and non-academic discussions is problematic as assumptions may prevail around what types of entrepreneurship matter (see Jones 2015 on the fictive entrepreneur), and what forms of work are enabling factors for the ‘neo-liberal woman’ within the boundaries of consumer capital. The keynote will acknowledge that Kinktrepreneurial activities exist in a professional and sex-positive context, are legitimate, and that the distinctive nature of Pro-Domme work, potentially contributes new embodied knowledge to entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial femininity.
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Dr Gemma Commane is Lecturer in Media and Communications, and an active researcher in the fields of media and cultural studies, and gender and sexuality. Her academic background is in Media and Cultural Studies, but she also specialised in Continental Philosophy. Gemma’s doctoral research was a cultural, sociological and ethnographic enquiry into female sexual identity in burlesque, fetish and BDSM clubbing cultures. Gemma’s research interests focus on contemporary cultural studies, alternative constructions of femininity, entrepreneurship within BDSM and kink, gender and sexuality, dirt and stigma, neo-burlesque / queer performance art and ethnography. She is currently working on her monograph: ‘Bad Girls, Dirty Bodies: Sex, Performance and Safe Femininity’ (I.B.Tauris 2019). Another area of research she is presently working on is: ‘Kinktrepreneurship, Sex Work and Social Media.’
Panel 1
Chris Foster - The Hierarchy of Aesthetic Queerness
Although they are often seen as liberatory spaces, this paper argues that queer/lgbtq communities reproduce their own hierarchies based upon norms of ‘queerness’. It will use theoretical concepts derived from Foucault, Bourdieu, and Rubin to analyse a series of qualitative interviews conducted with members of trans communities in the West Midlands. These interviews revealed how lgbtq people felt external pressure to conform to ‘queer-normative ideals’ to be accepted and validated within their social groups. It will argue that members of the community who seemingly conform better to queer norms are granted more social capital. This hierarchy is based on aesthetical queerness in which identity and presentation are prioritised over political conviction. Members of the community who have more social capital sometimes use their position as a shield for their abusive/problematic behaviour in which their ‘aesthetic’ queerness shrouds their actions. The purpose of this talk is to reexamine queer/lgbtq communities as areas of both resistance and control which reproduce queer bodies that conform to its narrow definition of non-normativity. To view lgbtq/queer spaces as inherently liberating is to misunderstand the mechanisms of power within social groups. Instead of policing ‘queer’ aesthetics the community should focus on deconstructing the norms which control and subjugate its members. In essence, this paper is calling for a queering of ‘queerness’.
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Chris recently finished their masters in Sexuality and Gender Studies and has since ‘enjoyed’ being exploited by the capitalist machine (Working). Their interest is the social construction of identity with focus on non-binary genders and is applying for Phd’s soon as it’s the easiest way to get a gender-neutral title.
Eliza Garwood – All Grown Up: the life narratives of adult-children with LGBTQ parents
Despite the increasing literature on LGBTQ kinship, there continues to be limited research on the (adult-)children within these families. The social, legal and political context for LGBTQ people has transformed drastically over the twentieth and twenty-first century and the construction of the life course for people with LGBTQ parents has formed alongside these changes. This paper explores the ways that the subjectivities of people with LGBTQ parents have shifted throughout their life course, particularly addressing the intersections of family, identity, social norms and historical context.
Based on biographic narrative interviews with adults who have been raised by LGBTQ parents, this paper will present a summary of the initial findings of a broader PhD research project exploring the life courses of people with LGBTQ parents. This will include the differing paths to disclosure and non-disclosure, intergenerational family dynamics and lack of a clear trajectory for community formation.
I focus on how people’s identities, everyday performances and feelings towards their ‘non-normative’ family have been shaped through their childhood and adolescence, family dynamics, turning points and socio-historical contexts. I interrogate how the power embedded within everyday spaces, such as the home, classroom, playground, workplace and church, may enable and/or constrain (adult-)children with LGBTQ parents. This power embeddedness specifically drives non-disclosure, feelings of belonging and isolation and the ability to navigate their own route into kinship and family construction. Ultimately, I seek to examine the way in which our intimate lives are historically, culturally and spatially situated.
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Eliza Garwood is a second-year PhD student in Geography and Environment at the University of Southampton. Her research interests include the geographies of gender and sexuality; queer geographies; LGBTQ kinship and intimacy and the potential for resistance through everyday enactments and experiences.
Panel 2
Matthew Cull – Resistant Metaphysics of Gender: Trans People Against Abolition
Analytic metaphysics of gender has, since Sally Haslanger’s landmark (2000, 2006, 2012) work, taken an ameliorative turn, concerned less with descriptive questions, such as Simone de Beauvoir’s famous “what is a woman?” and more with ethical and political questions regarding what our concept of gender ought to be, and how gendered society should therefore be structured, given current gender injustices, and our moral-political concerns. One traditional political position within feminism, abolitionism about gender, which claims that we ought to mandate gender out of existence, has therefore seen a renewed interest. This position is ameliorative in nature, demanding particular kinds of changes to our gender concepts and resistance to the way that society is organised – in this case, demanding that gender concepts and gender itself are eliminated from society. In this paper I will warn against a (re)turn to political advocacy for abolition.
I will consider three arguments for abolitionism from radically different perspectives – Sally Haslanger’s simple argument (Haslanger 2012), Alyson Escalante’s Gender Nihilism (Escalante 2016), and Susan Moller Okin’s argument from ideal theory (Okin 1989). I will deny that any of the above manage to establish the desirability of gender abolition – and, moreover, that as transfeminists we should be extremely wary of the abolitionist position, as despite being a supposedly progressive political program, it imperils trans lives in our current political situation.
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Matthew is a Ph.D candidate at the University of Sheffield. They work on anti-essentialist approaches to gender, bringing together trans and feminist theory with contemporary analytic metaphysics. They were editor of Aporia, and their work has appeared in Kriterion Journal of Philosophy, Collective Reflections, and Slutever.
Lydia Stone – You are not entirely certain how to operate this genital: The Trans Grotesque
Our attraction to horror can be analysed as counterphobic attitude – we seek out depictions of our worst fears being realised as a kind of self-inflicted exposure therapy in a safe environment, for the sense of relief when we walk out of the cinema and remember that, in all likelihood, our town will not be overrun by zombies. In the case of body horror, the fear exploited is that of the perversion of bodily integrity, whether through violence or disease, or with more nuance in transformation horror, through being forcibly changed into something grotesque and inhuman, at odds with our identity or personhood. This is enjoyable to be afraid of only because it is unlikely – for most people. For transgender people, the process of unwanted change into something grotesque begins in utero, calcifies at puberty, and even if alleviated by social and medical transition, only changes into something even more grotesque to society than it already is to yourself. As such, in fiction by and for trans people, the kind of grotesque transformation that would be horrific in mainstream stories is often the very opposite – uplifting, empowering, a kind of apotheosis. In this presentation I will be examining, across a range of media, the use of grotesque imagery in fiction by transgender people, analysing the ways and reasons it diverges from what we have come to expect of mainstream horror, and criticising the aspects of mainstream horror that assume an able-bodied, cis-normative audience.
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Lydia Stone is an English undergraduate at the University of Birmingham, interested in games and interactive fiction, transgender writing and genre theory.
Panel 3
Stefan Garel – Queer tinted teaching for 15 to 18 year olds in North-Eastern France
Through their construction of adulthood, adolescents simultaneously deconstruct and demystify both authority and its embodiment, the adult, which poses a firm challenge to any teacher. Not only can a queer reference in class (Quentin Crisp, lesbian feminism, transgender identities, Ikea marketing) cause unease, distrust or a mental block in teenagers, it can also be misconstrued as a form of proselytism, which is forbidden by the French school system. Thus, an enqueered approach to teaching the history of gender, identity politics and protest movements is a fraught and delicate journey.
The legalisation of same-sex marriage in May 2013, with the inference that any two unrelated, consenting adults can be recognised socially and legally as a couple, is slowly establishing those pairings outside a heteronormative and patriarchal model. So how is this reflected in the behaviour of our current lycée students? Ostensibly, they seem closer to verbalising and even performing their pan-curious doubts, whilst still unsure of the legitimacy of these urges. In this context, the prism offered by Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1899)[1] seems more tangible than ever; if teenage dreams censor the object of desire as a taboo, and replace it with a more familiar face, is queer-LGBTQI, cross-cultural visibility not an indispensable tool to help shape an open and worthy sense of self and sociability within these adults in potentia?
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After 10 years in filmmaking, Stefan went into teaching English and inter-cultural communication to head managers and postgraduates in France and Germany. He holds a PhD from the university of Exeter. Currently, Stefan works as a state school English teacher in France, directing an interdisciplinary workshop on fast food and the body.
Hugh Hammond – Prohibitions, Intelligibility, and the Agender Individual in Althusser’s Interpellative Scene*
The Althussersian concept of Interpellation refers to the process by which an individual becomes a subject, subjugated to the terms of the laws that bind a society. These laws, predominantly discursive, limit the field of possible acts available to the subject while simultaneously allowing those acts that fall within the purview of the law to be recognised as meaningful acts. Interpellation, then, presents a dilemma for those who wish to act outside the framework of the law as it limits the framework of meaning that can be understood by subjects operating within the law. This paper explores the ways in which gender is constituted through interpellation by the law and tries to conceptualise a method by which the agender individual – a person signifying themselves as possessing no gender – can enter the discursive framework of the law. A focus is given to the concept of the “prohibition”, as outlined by Judith Butler, as the point at which something becomes comprehensible within the law through its exclusion: to prohibit something, one most invoke its name in commanding its prohibition. The key, I argue, for something that is outside the discursive framework of the law to enter into it is, perversely, to produce a prohibition against itself. Through recourse to Marxist Feminist thinkers such as Silvia Federici and Laura Mulvaney, this paper will consider what it means to express a gender within capitalism. This will allow us to consider ways in which the Law can be forced to acknowledge agender modes of being and thus the journey towards agender acceptance can begin.
* the essay covers misgendering, aphobia, the threat of police violence, sexism, and to a lesser extent homophobia and incest in the context of Freudian psychoanalysis. These are all mostly discussed in theoretical terms and none of it is “extreme”.
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Hugh Hammond is a MA student studying Critical Methodologies at King’s College London. His interests include queer theory, structures of power, and the digital image in video games.
Panel 4
Lauren Arbuzzo – Against Commercial Surrogacy: A Gender and Sexualities Perspective
In this paper, I discuss moral problems that arise from commercial surrogacy (CS) as an example of selling one’s body or body parts. I assess CS that takes place via full surrogacy, i.e., the surrogate uses a donor egg and the hopeful parent’s sperm. I argue that legalising CS contracts is morally impermissible insofar as: (i) CS has a non-trivial chance of being consequentially bad for the surrogate, and (ii) CS contracts would be symbolically problematic for women and people with uteruses if endorsed by law. First, CS contracts require that (i) the surrogate takes particular physical and emotional risks that are not insignificant enough to permit CS. My reasoning is that allowing a subject to risk her health for non-urgent matters raises unique moral concerns in the case of CS, since, as I argue, the social implications of CS are inseparable from the contract itself. Additionally, I claim that (ii) legalising CS contracts sends an unpalatable message about the social value of women and people with uteruses. This is because only women and people with uteruses can acquiesce to CS contracts and thus they are the only ones who are vulnerable to the physical and emotional consequences. The risks of CS, then, are selective, and they thereby express worrisome notions about how society treats these individuals. My conclusion raises worries about the acceptability of selling one’s body or body parts when these processes express harmful social expectations about the gender and sexual roles of women and people with uteruses.
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Lauren Abruzzo is a postgraduate in the Human Values and Human Rights M.Sc. at the University of Birmingham. Her research explores topics in bioethics, theories of justice, and social epistemology. In August 2018, she will begin her Ph.D. in philosophy at City University of New York.
12:20 – Rob Thielker – (Trans) gender in John Lyly’s Galatea: early modern text explored through modern transgender performance
This paper will explore the gender of the two female lovers in Lyly’s Galatea, arguing that a modern queer reading should embrace transgender genders, and that such a reading is not ahistorical or anachronistic. The paper will begin with an overview of the characters and the textual moments where gender is affirmed, transgressed, crossed, or thrown out the window altogether. It will move on to the dramaturgical practices of the early modern stage, specifically regarding gender, and mark where these intersect with queer and trans dramaturgical practice today. Finally, the paper will look at the early modern gender context that trans performance of this text highlights, specifically the ways that trans embodiment and performance intersects with gendered embodiment and performance then. The paper will conclude with a thought on the power of connecting to history through embodiment.
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Rob Thielker is a trans MRes student researching early modern text through modern transgender performance. He presented research on queer narratives in E M Forster’s A Passage to India at Oxford Brookes University’s Undergraduate symposium and in 2018 he returned to the same symposium as a panel chair.
Panel 5
Emily Cox – “Her Eyes Were Green”: Assembling and Dissecting Women and Female Sexuality in Blade Runner/49
In 1980 Deleuze and Guattari argued in their work A Thousand Plateaus that “becoming-woman” is a process whereby “as atoms of womanhood capable of crossing and impregnating an entire social field, and of contaminating men, of sweeping them up in that becoming” (P.323). In other words, as women have entered the workplace and assumed more dominant roles their being has gradually altered the masculine world. Science fiction can be seen as going through the same process of transformation; a genre that has recently enjoyed great mainstream success, science fiction is no longer solely male-oriented genre as celebrated and long-standing franchises champion their new female heroines like Rey and Rose of the new Star Wars instalments and Michael Burnham of Star Trek: Discovery, the sequel Blade Runner 49, has similarly introduced new conceptualisations of femaleness and femininity.
Though not entirely unproblematic the film’s portrayal of women is tantalising in terms of its potential for analysis, partly as an example of an iconic film negotiating femaleness in new, progressive ways (and additionally contribute to new interpretations of the original blade runner film), but also as it informs as analysis of women’s social and political position more generally, as the product of the gender machine that produces and regulates the process by which a human becomes, grows and is culturally understood as a woman. Like the replicants of the Blade Runner universe, women themselves can be seen as similarly assembled, packaged and programmed for popular consumption. At the same time, however, their presence within the world, through the process of becoming-woman, has the potential to reconfigure the patriarchal apparatuses that commodify them.
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Dr. Emily Cox is a post-doctoral researcher specialising in gender theory, science fiction and the work of Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze. She recently completed doctoral dissertation on the portrayal of women in science fiction. In her thesis she explores the relationship between Gilles Deleuze’s system of the virtual and Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of inoperativity and bare life, arguing that their philosophies can be usefully allied with gender and feminist theory. She was recently awarded the SFRA Support a New Scholar Grant and is this year’s winner of Foundation’s essay competition.
Azadeh Sarjoughian – Shirin Neshat’s Photographic exploration: The Representation of Iranian Muslim Women In-Between Worlds
My research will attempt to further the analytical research on female identity embodied in contemporary Iranian art. In this regard, I will investigate what influences the visual strategies of Iranian artists, considering expectations imposed on their practices by two forces: the domestic ideological discourse and the Western audience. Furthermore, I aim to determine how Iranian artists would defy the monolithic or “one-view” formula of the image of the Muslim woman, woman-in-veil, in their works.
I concentrate on those Iranian artworks which emphasise a deconstruction of the West/East, masculine/feminine binaries by offering an interstitial space between fixed and stereotypical identifications. This paper is driven by the works of Shirin Neshat, a well-known female diasporic artist based in the US. By referencing to Neshat’s Women of Allah series, I attempt to examine the local and global reception of the works, as well as the present anxiety about self-exoticism in Iranian art criticism to indicate the dominant debates on the representation of Muslim women in the current social and cultural contexts. I suggest that the persistence of the practice of ‘self-exoticisation’ by non-Western artists can act as a reverse representational strategy, analogous to Foucault’s reverse discourse, which undermines the repressive mechanism of exoticism and reclaims the subjectivity of the exotic bodies. My intention is for this research to challenge the essentialised depiction of Muslim femininity and to create more diversity in general perceptions of Iranian artworks.
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Azadeh is currently studying for an MRes in Sexuality and Gender Studies, and holds a PhD place to study the representation of Muslim men’s and women’s bodies in contemporary Middle Eastern art. She is an artist, working with various media in sculpture, and installation. She is part of this year’s ROLES organising committee.
Panel 6
Patricia Nistor – The Past is a Queer Country
This paper will follow Henrik Olesen’s 2007 installation “Some GayLesbian Artists and/or Artists relevant to Homo-Social Culture Born between c. 1300–1870.” The seven panels show reproductions of famous paintings under headers like Bondage, Bodies, Girl’s Rooms, as well some textual sources. The main aim of the paper is to explore to what extent Olesen’s intervention can be seen as a tenable proposal towards a gay artistic canon. I will establish that his work is consequential because it successfully employs the structure of canonicity against itself, subverting its heteronormative tradition without denying its form, destroying and instituting at the same time. I will argue that his critique of the logic of canonicity is enough to create an expanded gay-lesbian canon understood in Griselda Pollock’s conceptualisation. Following a method similar to Pollock’s, Olesen reads so-called high art against the grain and teases out traces of homosocial desire. I will rely on Eve Sedgwick Kosofsky’s established definition of homosociality as a continuum and take a closer look at its blurriest part, the anxiety-inducing contact area between straight bonding and homoerotic desire. Olesen uses the accepted historical reality of this continuum but pushes it further by subverting authorised correlations between signs and meanings and taking them to irreverent new extremes. In order to see how his critique functions, it is necessary to show how Olesen’s work occupies an interstitial space between queer and gay-lesbian taxonomies. Overall, his productive heuristic will be deemed a necessary intervention into how transgressive bodies can be re-instituted into canons and history.
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Patricia Nistor is a University of Birmingham graduate, currently working towards a Research Masters in Arts and Culture at Leiden University. Her research interests are diverse, focusing on questions of public space and reclaiming the city as well as constructions of the feminine in various contexts, from Weimar Germany to the field of bio-art.
Keisha Fraser-Bruce – Dissecting Millennial Black Feminism: Black Women’s Spaces, Histories and Images
This paper discusses how Black women have utilised pop-culture and social media to resist fictitious myths of Black womanhood. Recently, a Black Feminist pop-culture has developed which prioritises the visible and audible exposure for Black women. I conceptualise this Black female-centred pop-culture moment as a product of, what I term, Millennial Black Feminism (MBF). MBF uses social media and pop-culture to reassess and then reform Black women’s cultural representation. It is a process in which the Black woman becomes visible and regains the means to liberate herself. Visibility is at the core of the cultural movement and although Black women’s invisibility has been a subject of Black feminist discussion since the late 1800s, it is only now that Black women are able to directly challenge it due to the influence of former and current Black liberation movements, the emergence of a democratic cyberspace and a distinctly Black-tailored pop-culture.
This paper begins by briefly discussing the key influences that provide a background to understanding the origins of MBF: #BlackLivesMatter, 1970s Black Power aesthetics, and Afrocentrism. Afterwards, this paper will outline MBF’s methods: “creation” of Black women-owned spaces, “reclamation” of resistance memory, and “reconstruction” of Black women’s self-image, and tests these against several sources including the hashtag #BlackGirlMagic, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s visual album, Lemonade (2016), Issa Rae’s television series Insecure (2016) Ultimately this paper aims to contribute to Black Feminist thought as it conceptualises a popular cultural movement as a distinct wave of Black Feminism.
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Keisha Fraser-Bruce currently assists on the AHRC-funded networking project “Geographies of Black Protest”. She will begin her PhD in Black Studies at the University of Nottingham in Autumn 2018 and this will offer a transatlantic study of digital blackness. Her interests include African Diaspora studies, Black Feminism and pop-culture.