Barbara Einhorn, Emeritus Professor of Gender Studies, University of Sussex
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Wednesday 31 October 2012
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3.30-5.00pm
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Room CON.1.05, Connaught House, LSE Campus
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Chaired by Dr Ania Plomien
Open to all - no booking required.
Abstract
Professor Einhorn has kindly allowed her powerpoint slides for Human Security: The Role of Gender to be made available for download.
The end of the Cold War was declared in dominant Western discourses to signify the triumph of ‘freedom’, democracy and capitalist market economies. What is increasingly clear twenty two years on is that we are living in a period of ongoing crisis.
Beyond outward manifestations, the real crisis is the end, not of history, but of political utopias, of visions, however imperfectly realised, of a socially just future. The global dominance of the neo-liberal paradigm has enthroned individualism as the only value worth aspiring to. In this world where social links have been broken, there is a felt need for collective belonging. Politicians are distrusted, and economists at sea. In the resulting vacuum, populist and authoritarian political slogans and fundamentalist religious discourses offer increasingly attractive certainties.
My presentation on nationalism, conflict and religion puts gender at the centre of the analysis. How is gender instrumentalised to legitimate armed conflict? How are notions of patriotism, heroism and militarism underpinned by stereotypes of masculinity and its counterparts, docile and weak, or sexualised femininity? This paper argues that human security can be achieved only through a gender sensitive politics which enables men and women to build just and sustainable social relations.
Biography
Barbara Einhorn is Emeritus Professor of Gender Studies in the Department of Sociology at The University of Sussex. Her research interests include: citizenship, gender and civil society; migration, ‘home’ and belonging; gender and mass dictatorships; nation and identity; religion, gender, and conflict. She is internationally known for her work on gender and citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe.
Selected publications include: Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and Women’s Movements in East Central Europe (1993); ‘Gender, Nation, Landscape and Identity in Narratives of Exile and Return’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 23 (6) 2000: 701-713; ‘Gender and Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe’ (with Charlotte Sever), International Feminist Journal of Politics, 5(2) 2003: 163-190; Citizenship in an Enlarging Europe: From Dream to Awakening (2006; expanded paperback edition 2010); ‘Insiders and Outsiders: Within and Beyond the Gendered Nation’, pp. 196-213 in Kathy Davis, Mary Evans and Judith Lorber (eds) Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies (2006); Editor of Questioning the Secular: Religion, Gender, Politics, Special Issue of the European Journal of Women’s Studies, 15(3) 2008; ‘Mass Dictatorship and Gender Politics: Is the Outcome Predictable?’ pp. 42-55in Jie-Hyun Lim and Karen Petrone (eds) Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship (2010); and (co-authored with Mary Evans) Confronting Gender: Politics, Conflict and Religion in Global Perspective (2014 forthcoming).