trans/forming feminisms

We are proud to share with you Audrey Yue‘s keynote title and abstract:

“Of all the continents in the world, Asia is the gayest!”: Some Notes on Queer Asia as Method

This paper borrows its title from a tongue-in-cheek remark by gay Asian Australian writer Benjamin Law as a platform to critically explore the stakes involved in living in, writing about and theorizing the contours of such a gay continent. It reflects on two developments in critical theory that have brought new methods in the humanities: the turn to Asia as a source of debate in theory, and the transnational turn in queer studies. To demonstrate this encounter between queer theory and Asia, this paper develops the critical paradigm of Queer Asia as Method. This paradigm highlights cultural representations that decenter the globalized formation of “queer”; initiate critical conversations on intra-regional cultural flows that are local and international; and provincialize Anglo-American queer knowledge production by revealing its local specificity and non-universality. This paper uses three case studies from Singapore that examine colonial transsexual history, transgender biomedical modernity and the contemporary inter-Asian performances of tomboy boybands to examine how these practices of trans-ing can be mobilized as strategies that inform the critical paradigm of Queer Asia as Method.

Audrey is an Associate Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She will be delivering her Keynote address at 9am on 24th November, 2015. Check out our tentative timetable here: http://transformingfeminisms.noblogs.org/post/2015/09/25/tentative-timetable/

We are delighted to share with delegates Tracey McIntosh‘s keynote title and abstract:

Transgress, translate, transcend, transform? Criminalised women and creative writing

Prisons are receptacles of confined experience. This ability to simultaneously reveal and conceal the nature of the experience of prison in Māori life-worlds shows the power of a discourse that renders the prison a natural part of the social environment for particular groups. It is important to recognise that the Māori experience of prison is gendered.

We deal with difference in every part of our lives, much of it passing unremarked, or accepted as contributing to the colour and vibrancy of everyday life. Yet there are other responses to difference that critically shape the social and cultural parameters of our collective existence. In my work difference has too often meant devastation, disappearance, disintegration and dislocation to vulnerable sectors of society. Amnesia initiated by the dominant group can be seen as a wilful forgetting or a legitimated ignorance of the social processes and the exercising of unequal power relations that has resulted in an embedded marginalisation. Responses to difference can be mapped over time and place and in this paper I draw on the writing of women in prison that articulates raw experience and responses to their environment in the recognition that they are experts of their own condition.

Tracey is an Associate Professor and Head of Sociology at the University of Auckland. She will be delivering her Keynote address at 9am on 23rd November 2015. Check out our tentative timetable here: http://transformingfeminisms.noblogs.org/post/2015/09/25/tentative-timetable/