[csaa-forum] Public Seminar and Masterclass With Ulrika Dahl, UQ, March 16 and 17

Tue Mar 2 13:05:27 CST 2010

Apologies for cross-posting

The Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland is pleased to announce that it will host a 

PUBLIC SEMINAR by Ulrika Dahl on Tuesday, March 16.

The seminar will be held at the University of Queensland in the CCCS Seminar Room, Level 4 of the Forgan-Smith Tower, from 3-5pm.

A masterclass  will be held in conjunction with this public seminar on Wednesday, March 17, from 2-5 pm.

All details follow below.

To rsvp for this public seminar or enrol in the masterclass, please email Elizabeth Stephens: e.stephens at uq.edu.au.

Seminar Abstract: (Re)Figuring Femme Fashion

With Pandora's curiosity, in this paper I reopen the (dress up) box of femme fashion(ing). I do so not to once again release the diseases and plagues that the trappings of femininity have cast upon womankind, nor to celebrate an inherent "subversive queerness" of contemporary femmes and certainly not to suggest that there is one box into which femme as a (dressed) identity would fit. Rather, through a focus on fashion(ing) with queer orientations, I want to sketch the contours of what I call femme as figuration, where the presumed instability of femme is not a problem for visibility politics but a productive start for rethinking femininities and considering alternative feminist subjectivities.

By going back into the closet, searching my femme archives, climbing my feminine library stacks and drawing on my on-going research and conversations with femmes in urban sub-cultural settings in the US, Western Europe and Australia, with figuration I aim to move beyond liberal queer identity politics and consider both the making of a femme figure and how femmes figure into broader feminist and queer knowledge production, politics and communities. Focusing the shifting meanings of beauty and dress up boxes among differently situated femmes I then propose a somatechnics of femme subjectivity constituted through a range of fashionable and laborious body modification practices enacted in a political economy of desire for sisterhood as well as sex. 

Suggestively inspired by images made by Del LaGrace Volcano in collaboration with the subjects of our book Femmes of Power, my spectre is not that of the fashion theorist concerned with reading the semiotics of garments, but rather the speculum of the femme-inist ethnographer who mirrors herself in others by both participating in and studying femme movements and aesthetics. Drawing on a long line of femme theorists, I take comfort not in originality but in endless copying as itself a productive part of the emerging femme figuration. Writing the fashioned femme body with painted lips that speak together and red nails clicking against a keyboard connected to transnational, virtual and visual communities, this paper is an(other) hopeful, humble and cheeky reconsideration of l'ecriture femme-inine, a re-vision of what Irigaray called the specular make up of discourse around queer femininity. 

Masterclass on Queer Feminist Ethnography for transdisciplinary gender studies: A femme-inist perspective on siting, sighting and citing

In transdisciplinary gender studies, many scholars engage with people, objects, and representations in ways that we might call 'ethnographic'; that is, we interview, document, observe, collect and organize data within communities of practice. In addition, many of us work with/in fields where we are not the only knowledge producers and seekers and within which we may be many things aside from researchers. How do we negotiate these positions and use them productively and queerly in our work? 

This workshop engages questions pertaining to how, at the intersection of queer and feminist commitments to critiques of research conventions on the one hand and commitments to ethical representations and 'use' of one's research on the other, queer feminist scholars negotiate our relationship to and political stakes in research. 

Drawing on her experiences of collaborative and engaged femme-inist research, Ulrika Dahl will discuss the poetics and politics of ethnographic and visual representation and give some hands on advice to those who are engaging with questions concerning a queer and feminist ethic of research. 

About the Presenter: 

Ulrika Dahl is Assistant Professor and Chair in gender studies Södertörn University in Stockholm. She has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology/women's studies from UC Santa Cruz and is author, with Del LaGrace Volcano of Femmes of Power: Exploding Queer Femininities (Serpent's Tail, 2008). Her current research concerns formations of gender studies in the Nordic region and she also has a book project on femme-ininity and feminist theory. Ulrika has been a  key femme voice within Scandinavian (queer) feminist activism and press since 2002 and is also editor of Lambda Nordica, a Nordic journal on GLBT studies. 

Elizabeth Stephens
ARC Research Fellow
Centre for the History of European Discourses
University of Queensland Australia 4072
Phone: 61 7 3346 9493
Fax: 61 7 3346 9495
Webpage: http://uq.academia.edu/ElizabethStephens

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