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- Convenor:
-
Jessica Sandelson
(University of Oxford)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Bodies
- Location:
- Magdalen Summer Common Room
- Start time:
- 18 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel focuses on gender at the level of the creative body, moving past debates about its origin (as social/biological, performance/essence). Papers address gender as a bodily feeling, and explore its power to move us.
Long Abstract:
Political commentators in Western countries have announced that we are in the midst of a gender revolution. Growing communities of people creatively express and negotiate their gender, often drawing on anthropological examples of cross-cultural variation.
Theories about the origins of gender have been tied to binaries of gender/sex, imagined/material, performance/essence, and social/biological. This panel instead looks to the creative body to address the ways we feel our gender and how these feelings move us. This is not only a question for those who do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth; everyone has a sense of their own gender.
Anthropology is uniquely positioned to address the power of gendered bodily feelings, which are always material and tied up with social relations. This panel brings together papers spanning how gender is imagined, represented, and communicated, with embodied insights from phenomenology, feminist epistemologies, and affect studies.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Drawing on fieldwork with trans adults with disordered eating in the UK, this paper re-considers ideas around trans body image. It explores how an emphasis on appearance works to erase gendered histories, feelings, and social relationships.
Paper long abstract:
Discussions of transgender experience in the UK often revolve around physical appearance. Gender is frequently framed in visual terms, as something that has to be seen to be believed. Historic tropes around 'passing' and being 'born in the wrong body' suggest that trans experience is rooted in what a person looks like.
This paper suggests a notion of the 'cis gaze', which defines trans lives in terms of appearance. The gaze reduces trans experience as superficial, by suggesting that it is literally skin-deep. It also expects trans bodies to align with the appearance of cis bodies - or at least to desire to. These ideas carry into clinical understandings of disordered eating among trans people, which is often framed in entirely visual terms.
Yet, trans people themselves articulate gender in radically different ways. This paper draws from research with trans adults living with disordered eating in the UK. It pays attention to what image and appearance mean in people's lives. The visual cannot be divorced from bodily histories, social relations, and identity. What is seen is also felt and can be a powerful way of communicating with others.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I explore how young Bamileke women living in Yaounde (Cameroon) embody gender in practices of photography and dress
Paper long abstract:
Young Bamileke women engage in a set of creative bodily practices including: rubbing their skins with bleaching creams and oils, applying pressure and heat to their hair, dressing their bodies in fashionable garments in such a way as to create contrast and sheen that attracts the eye and so on. Then they display their bodies for the camera lens during sessions in photographic studios, at different ceremonies and for their phones cameras; taking on a variety of poses that are modelled on those of celebrities from local and international popular culture. Although some see these figures as role models, most of young woman appropriate only some aspects of their appearance, such as make-up, dress or hair style, that they define as feminine. When young women appropriate different appearances this is rarely verbalised, and when it is, claims are made in terms of feeling and affect. As practices involving their bodies, dressing and posing work on the senses as appearances are embodied. Furthermore, through the different aesthetic performances, young women are able to engage and disengage male desire and seduce or repel others. Through dress and photography, I argue, young women work on their bodies to transform themselves into feminine subjects. The feeling of gender emerges on the surface of skin when substances are rubbed in, dresses hold their bodies or when young woman are posing whereas photographs sediment it, visually and materially.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation offers intimate experiences of Sahrawi refugee diaspora and the implication of digital transnational gossip in their everyday media usage practice. Through a social media ethnography, this proposal analyzes the relevance of gossip as a transnational mechanism of community control.
Paper long abstract:
Gossip is a relevant challenge in multi-sited transnational fields due to the continued exchange of information between those who move and those who stay. According to recent studies, the connection of gossip, with the maintenance of the unity, morality and values of groups beyond borders, have reinforced certain mechanism of control over women due to their role as protectors of community values and tradition. In this sense, digital technologies, through their immediacy, have increased the spread of information beyond boundaries which involved dissemination of information between communities who may be separated. This research analyzes the implication of digital transnational gossip as one element that articulates social norms and values that reinforce the sense of belonging to a certain community. Looking at the Sahrawi refugee diaspora, this research describes the consequences women face when they are objects of gossip on Facebook, while at the same time pointing out the different strategies taken to subvert community gender norms. Using different profiles, restricting the audience with Facebook's privacy settings, or not posting photos are some of the individual strategies used to limit the impact of digital transnational gossip in everyday media usage. This research draws evidence from ongoing social media ethnography with Sahrawi women in Spain and Mauritania which involves interviewing users and collecting relevant digital material in blogs, social media (Facebook), and face-to-face encounters or events. To sum up, this presentation tries to understand the relation between migration and connectivity to offer situated digital intimate experiences in an interconnected world.