A public keynote by Kate McNicholas Smith (Lancaster) for the 'Doing Justice to Figures and Figuration' graduate symposium.
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Date: Friday 19 June 2015
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Time: 11:00 - 12:00
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Room: Thai Theatre (NAB)
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Full-day graduate symposium to follow public keynote
The event is free and open to all, but registration is required. Please visit our registration page to sign up.
Abstract:
As a proliferation of TV representations begins to depict lesbian teenagers, cheerleaders, wives and mothers, we see the emergence of new lesbian figures. Drawing on a forthcoming article with Dr. Imogen Tyler (Lancaster), this paper will propose a figurative methodology for tracking these new sites of visibility. Centrally I will consider the lesbian bride; a figure that evokes a complex struggle of post-feminist femininity, queer rupture and sentimental fantasies of belonging. In the context of a deeply conservative and increasingly intolerant state, these figures emerge as progress narratives of (neo)liberal tolerance. As they circulate in cultural discourse, they might nonetheless open up meaningful frames of recognition; uncoupling the lesbian from abject figurations and locating her in multiple sites of belonging. Yet, as these newly possible narratives of romance and futurity complicate marginalising frames of lesbian representation, they do so through a disturbing normativity. In this reorganisation of social belonging, there is both an opening up and closing down of intelligibility. In tracking these shifts, this paper extends Angela McRobbie’s account of postfeminist popular culture (2004) to propose the emergence of a post-queer sensibility; a complex entanglement of social change, queer belonging and hetero-sexist backlash. This paper follows Donna Haraway in considering the ‘scholarly soap opera’ of interrelated figures (1997: 22) that constitute the representational struggles of social belonging. Centrally it posits figurative methodologies as offering frames through which to track the symbolic configurations of social worlds; opening up a critical practice of unravelling and remaking.
Graduate Symposium:
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Date: Friday 19 June 2015
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Time: 10:30 - 17:00
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Room: Thai Theatre (NAB Lower Ground Floor)
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(Includes lunch and public keynote by Kate McNicholas Smith)
Please visit our registration page to sign up.
Kate McNicholas Smith's talk is the public keynote for the ESRC and Gender Institute supported graduate symposium: Doing Justice to Figures and Figuration. This one-day symposium seeks to bring together interdisciplinary scholars in the social sciences working on figuration and/or with figures. Figuration – the process of consolidating understandings of individuals and populations into a particular form or idea – is increasingly understood as significant to mobilizing and understanding social and political life. In the stigmatization or celebration of figures, affective and historical discourses of gender, ability, race, religion, sexuality, age, class, and nation are called upon to structure social and political life. Thinking across political and academic uses of figuration, Doing Justice to Figures and Figuration seeks to create a space in which to discuss the potentials and risks of using and interrogating figures within academic research.