Seminar

Gender promiscuities: biopolitical crossroads and queer and feminist analysis at the empire outskirts

João Oliveira (Universidade do Minho, Birkbeck Institute for Social Research - UK)

December 15, 2010, 17h00

Seminar Room (2nd Floor), CES-Coimbra

 

Abstract

This seminar focus on how the research on gender (Amâncio, 2004) has allowed the production of an analysis of subjectiveness modes. These processes are seen through a perspective of intersection between gender standards and hegemonic heterosexuality, as put forward by Judith Butler (2004). Thus, I will present some of the research that I have been conducting recently on subjectiveness modes, showing the analytical impossibility of separating sexualities and gender. My presentation will consist on a process of re-reading my own research. This research resignification can be understood as part of a wider process of localized knowledge production (Haraway, 1991). I will give examples of researches conducted on LGBTQ people in Portugal, on the debate around Voluntary Termination of Pregnancy and on lesbians and feminists in Portugal, discussing its place in the outskirts (Santos, 1985) of an empire of sexual exceptionalism (Puar, 2007). I will argue on how gender, in its polysemy, allows a route through intersections that a production analysis requires. I will focus on the symbiogenesis (Haraway, 2008) between post-structural feminist theory and queer theory in order to understand how gender as pharmakos (Derrida, 1981) acts as an analytical tool, essential to the deconstruction processes of domination relationships, while being used, in its exclusively individual meaning, as an oxymoron from the perspective of queer feminism. It is, however, in the conceptual wealth of appropriations being made based on the concept that I build gender as a fundamental perspective to a feminism of queer multitudes (Preciado, 2003), a place of political articulation (Laclau&Mouffe, 1985) joined by a promiscuous concept.


Biographic Note

João Manuel de Oliveira is a researcher on the field of gender studies and feminist theory. His research interests include, among others, human rights of women and LGBTQ people, sexual and reproductive rights and the symbolic asymmetry in gender hierarchy. He is, currently, conducting his research on issues related to lesbian sexualities. He holds a Doctoral Degree in Social Psychology by ISCTE, where he also obtained his Master's and Graduate Degrees.