trans/forming feminisms

We are delighted to announce Sandra Grey‘s Keynote title and abstract:

Dispatching patriarchy one tweet, blog, and Facebook entry at a time?

The world of social media is one both full of emancipatory potential and stultifying gender hierarchies. Web-based enclaves can provide safe spaces for feminists to discuss their diverse identities, issues, and needs, but it can simultaneously be an uncivil-civil space. To unpack these tensions and critically engage with debates about navigating the world of social media, identity, and activism, I will draw on social movement scholarship and my experiences as an activist-academic over the past decade. There is little doubt that we need safe spaces as feminists to discuss our diverse identities and formulate plans aimed at dispatching patriarchal structures. However, scholarship and activist knowledge show the job is not one to be done wholly online.

Sandra is an academic in the School of Social and Cultural Studies at Victoria University, Wellington. She is also the current President of the Tertiary Education Union, NZ. Sandra will be delivering her Keynote address at 11am on 25th November 2015. She will also be delivering a workshop on union activism and feminist politics with TEU organiser, Kris Smith and Otago TEU Branch President, Tree La Rooy at 2.30 pm on 24th November 2015.

You can check out the conference’s tentative timetable here: http://transformingfeminisms.noblogs.org/post/2015/09/25/tentative-timetable/

We are pleased to share with you Constance Penley‘s Keynote address title and abstract:

Sex Work in Industry and Academe: Feminist Porn

The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (2013) was the first collection to bring together writings by feminist porn producers and feminist porn scholars to engage, challenge, and reimagine pornography. Strongly influenced by other social movements in the realm of sexuality, like the sex-positive, LGBTQI rights, and sex worker’s rights movements, feminist porn aims to build community, to expand liberal views on gender and sexuality, and to educate and empower performers and audiences. It favors fair, ethical working conditions for sex workers and the inclusion of underrepresented identities and practices. Feminist porn challenges the hegemonic depictions of gender, sex roles, and the pleasure and power of mainstream porn. It also challenges the anti-porn feminist interpretive framework for pornography as bankrupt of progressive sexual politics. As a budding movement, it promotes aesthetic and ethical practices that intervene in dominant sexual representation and mobilize a collective vision for change. This erotic activism, which is in no way homogeneous or consistent, works within and against the marketplace to imagine new ways to envision gender and sexuality in our culture. Penley, who edited The Feminist Porn Book for The Feminist Press with author/sex educator/pornographer Tristan Taormino and professors Mireille Miller-Young and Celine Parreñas Shimizu, will address the response to this unprecedented coming together of feminist academics and feminist pornographers. She will also address some of the discoveries that came out of this collaborative effort, including the shared recognition of how precarious labor conditions affect our work in both the adult industry and academe.

Constance is a Professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is also the founding Director and Co-Director Emerita of the Carsey-Wolf Centre. Constance was a founding co-editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media. Constance will be delivering her Keynote address at 4pm on 24th November 2015.

Recently, Constance was involved in the Feminist Porn Mini Con at UCSB. At this event, on 2nd April 2014, a number of the contributors to the The Feminist Porn Book collection got together for a photo. They are (Top from left to right) Constance Penley, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Tristan Taormino, Jiz Lee and Carlos Batts; (Bottom left to right) Kevin Heffernan, Dylan Ryan, Mireille Miller-Young, Sinnamon Love and April Flores.

The Feminist Porn Book was published by The Feminist Press (CUNY Press) and you can find out more about it here: http://www.feministpress.org/books/feminist-porn-book

You can check out the conference’s tentative timetable here: http://transformingfeminisms.noblogs.org/post/2015/09/25/tentative-timetable/

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/

Our second keynote speaker has just been confirmed! Dr Sandra Grey is a senior lecturer in the School of Social and Cultural Studies at Victoria University, Wellington. She works on social activism in New Zealand with a particular focus on women’s and union struggles.

Alongside her academic role, Sandra is the National President of the Tertiary Education Union.