COST Action IS0803 2009, Workshop 3
COST IS0803 2009 WS3
Gender and Sexuality
Helsinki (Finland), 4-5 December 2009
Convenor: Tuija Pulkkinen
University of Helsinki, Christina Institute
tuija.pulkkinen@helsinki.fi
The Summary Report on this meeting is now available here.
Title: Gender and Sexuality – Border Issues
Gender and sexuality are highly present at borders, marking and remarking both the differences and the similarities. Conceptual and normative borders of genders and sexualities are often also created and dissolved within border exchanges. Crossing normative borders of gender and sexuality is a permanent feature of European Eastern peripheries in multiple ways. The first Gender and Sexuality workshop concentrates on the intersection of gender and sexuality at borders, both concrete and conceptual. Marriages across borders, trafficking, and dating services, are prevalent, but are not the only forms of mobilizing sexuality at borders. Conceptual constructions such as “Eastern-ness” or “orientalism” as sexually relevant are also border issues, as much as the travelling of concepts of different “sexualities”. Gender and sexuality norms are constantly activated at borders. The workshop explores interconnected issues of gender and sexuality at Europe’s Eastern peripheries, simultaneously creating, dissolving and crossing these borders. Papers on living the borders of sexualities and genders on European Eastern peripheries (meant both conceptually and/or in terms of geographical location) are invited. Empirical work which challenges the present conceptual frameworks as well as conceptual work informed by the study of everyday practices at borders is most welcome, as are conceptual papers theorizing generally borders at the intersection of gender and sexuality.
Participant: Dr Laura Assmuth
Dept of Sociology/Academy of Finland
University of Helsinki
Finland
Email: laura.assmuth@helsinki.fi
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Asymmetries of gender and generation on a post-Soviet borderland The paper aims to show how the intertwined perspectives of gender and generation can shed light empirically on the analysis of borders and life in the borderlands. I present an ethnographic case study from an area where the state borders are relatively recent outcomes of political, economic and social changes brought about by the end of state socialism. My studies at the post-Soviet borderlands between Russia, Estonia and Latvia have focused on everyday practices and ideals connected with new state borders. I discuss new kinds of asymmetries that have developed in this Baltic border area in the years following the break-up of the Soviet Union. Some asymmetries clearly traceable to the Soviet period persist, while new kinds of dividing lines have emerged between
individuals and groups of people. Border-related activities are deeply gendered: women’s activities are most certainly different from those of men, whether we look at employment, trade, smuggling, shopping, cross- border social networks, religious activities, almost anything that people do in a border area. Gendered and generation-related changes are evident not only in the everyday practices of the borderland residents but also in the ways they understand and experience the border and the social realities on the other side of it.
Participant: Dr Anne Britt Flemmen
Dept. of sociology
University of Tromsø
Norway
Email: anne.britt.flemmen@sv.uit.no
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Transnational marriage and intimate citizenship
Ken Plummer (2003) describes a situation where the public sphere is increasingly pluralized and contested, while people’s private lives very often are subject to public scrutiny and debate. A situation where our intimate decisions are increasingly bound up with public institutions such as legal codes, political systems or the media. He suggests ‘intimate citizenship’ as a
sensitizing concept for exploring these new tendencies. Based on previous empirical research on transnational marriages between Russian women and Norwegian men in the northern part of Norway (Flemmen 2004, Flemmen 2007, Lotherington and Flemmen 2007, Flemmen and Lotherington 2008, Flemmen 2008), I would like to use the opportunity to explore intimate citizenship as a theoretical concept. Marriages across borders between women from the ‘East’ and men from the ‘West’ represent a particularly well suited starting point for exploring the kind of border work practiced at the intersection of gender, sexuality and nationality. At the cross-road between marriage laws and immigration laws the public and private spheres is actualized in particular ways.
Participant: Dr Zuzana Búriková
Social Anthropology, Department of Sociology
Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University
Czech Republic
Email: burikova@yahoo.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Au pairs are young people (mostly women) who stay temporarily with foreign families, whom they offer childcare and/or light housework for bed, board and pocket money. Often being abroad or away from their parental homes for first time, Slovak female au pairs conceptualize their au pair stays as a rite de passage they want to pass in order to become adult, experienced and/or successful. A year’s ethnography of their experience revealed that they frequently use their stays abroad to push borders of gender normativity: they may use it as a tool for an empowerment in relationships with men, for getting and exercising agency, or for experiencing sexual freedom and transgressions.
Participant: Ms Olga Davydova
Karelian Institute
University of Joensuu
Finland
Email: olga.davydova@joensuu.fi
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Gender and the Checkpoint
The idea of this paper has born in collaboration with my colleague Pirjo Pöllänen. She has been studied marriage-based migration of Russian women to North Karelia and once proposed me to give a common presentation on “woman friendly border”. Being an immigrant woman myself, I recollected several experiences of gendered character of the border and border crossings, being placed as sexualized “Russian woman”. In my paper I ponder border and border crossing on the checkpoint from the theoretical point of view provided by Joane Nagel (2003). She conceptualizes “the intersections of racial, ethnic, or
national boundaries” as ethnosexual frontiers. These are “the borderlands on either side of ethnic divides… [and] constitute symbolic and physical sensual spaces where sexual images and sexual contacts occur between members of different racial, ethnic, and national groups. … Ethnosexual frontiers are sites where ethnicity is sexualized, and sexuality is racialized, ethnicized, and nationalized” (ibid., 14). We have observed border crossings in Värtsilä-Niirala as activities within the ethnosexual frontiers of North Karelia and Sortavala region of Republic of Karelia. How ethnicities are sexualized in physical environments of the checkpoint, in what practices the border is gendered, what sexualized representations of ethnicities exist in media in the border regions?
Participant:
Dr Rozita Dimova
Institute for Eastern European Studies
Free University Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin)
Germany
Email: rozita@zedat.fu-berlin.de
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
“Makiladoras” and “Prostitutes:”
Female sex and textile workers in the border area between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia As the largest investors in the Republic of Macedonia, the Greek government has stimulated investments, especially in the border areas between the two countries. These investments have induced rise of prostitution, sprouting hotels and casinos in the border areas, especially on the Macedonian side. The large chain of textile factories in the southern part of the Republic of Macedonia, stretching between Bitola and Prilep, have been critical in reviving the dying textile industry after the collapse of the socialist state-owned factories.This paper will offer a preliminary sketch of the gendered dimension of the border-area between
Greece and the Republic of Macedonia in which female sex workers and female factory workers in the Greek- owned textile factories in the Republic of Macedonia reveal how critical gender is in regulating border practices. By placing this border-area case in a larger transnational context (e.g. the Mexican female Makiladoras in the border area between the US and Mexico, the female textile workers in the Philippines and Southeastern Asia, the Pacific Rim, or South America), I will examine the neoliberal logic that provides the framework for the prevalence of these conditions.
Participant: Dr AntkeEngel
Institute for Queer Theory
Germany
Email: engel@queer-institut.de
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Daring Tensions - Subverting Rigid Border Regimes
I would like to suggest understanding borders as 'avoidance strategies' or 'evasion manoeuvers': rather than daring to live with dissent, heterogeneity and tension, one puts up borders in order to create a seemingly stable relation, where processes of exchange are strictly regulated. Yet, borders are very often areas of conflict and tension, and only strict border controls can prevent theses conflicts/tensions from turning violent. My supposition is that it is exactly an understanding of tension as
something that is to be avoided that provides for and sustains these rigid and often violent border regimes. In turning to queer/feminist considerations of tension as means of supporting socio-cultural processes of desire and recognition, I would like to rethink borders. How can these considerations developed in the field of sexual and gender relations, provide for an understanding of geo-political borders? But also the other way round: How are geo-political borders modelled on heterosexualized binary gender relations - and how can they be questioned with the help of queer theories?
Participant: Dr Carola Häntsch
Department of Philosophy
University of Greifswald
Germany
Email: haentsch@uni-greifswald.de
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Shifting Identities
The former GDR as part of the West and as part of the former East-bloc The political, cultural and intellectual transformations which happened in the former GDR after 1989 represent in an exemplary manner the so called “Wende” and the replacement and overlay of Eastern identities by the standards of the European “West”. Nowhere else in the former East bloc this replacement happened with the same intensity. Especially the complete replacement of the intellectual elite in the former East Germany is a single case in the Baltic region. Strongly negative experiences were made by the former GDR citizens especially in the fields of education and women/ gender and family politics. Because of this the former GDR should be studied much more intensively as a model case for the shifts of communicative structures and identities. The 20th
anniversary of the re-unification of Germany in 2009 will show that the “West-German” and the “East- German” views on these processes differ essentially, already now the struggle about the power of interpretation (Deutungshoheit) is going on. In this context it is very often forgotten that only the former GDR citizens have the “real” possibility to compare two systems of society. Because of this their voices should be heard as long as they are still available. The paper exemplifies the experiences of shifting identities with regard to the picture of “the woman” and sexuality. On the one hand the approach towards sexuality opened up after 1989 extremely, on the other hand for former GDR citizens this approach to sexuality seems to be a very artifical one. The paper is part of of a long term book project (25 years of common history of Germany, 2014).
Participant: Prof Eeva Jokinen
Department of Sociology and Social Polic
University of Joensuu
Finland
Email: eeva.jokinen@joensuu.fi
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Precarious gender in North-Karelia
After the feminisation of labour and the precarisation of life. Due to the globalisation of capitalism and its crises, peripheral border regions like North-Karelia have become more linked to the world economy at the same time as the polarisation between metropolises and peripheries, richness and poverty, growth and decline deepens. Neo-liberal politics of society aims at ensuring that people move as freely as possible and major transformations (or “crisis”) in the economy do indeed need restless people and their workforce. Changes in the modes of production and especially technological development have made it possible to create value from “the human capital”: human capacities to think, take care, be near, enjoy, love etc.
Accordingly, issues linked to gender and sexuality have entered into the area of production. In the literature, this kind of tendencies has been analysed under the concepts of feminisation and precarisation. However, these two concepts are merely descriptive and we need more detailed empirical analyses and good theoretical thinking to understand the new regime of gender, and especially, what happens to women and men at the borderlands. I will consult Cristina Morini’s provocation, according to which ‘work becomes a woman’, and proceed to consider, based on group discussions conducted spring 2009, how the current situation is made livable by Finns and Russian migrants in North-Karelia.
Participant: Ms Katja Kahlina
Department of Gender Studies
Central European University
Hungary
Email: katja.kahlina@gmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Challenging the Borders of the Nation: Gays and Lesbians in Croatia
The nation-building process that emerged in the beginning of 1990s in Croatia was based on the construction of a national identity that imposed a heterosexual hyper-masculine male as the ideal citizen. Moreover, discourses of “tolerance” that emerged in relation to the process of accessing the EU after 2000 hardly challenged the heteromasculine norm of new
national identity. Hence, my assumption is that in order to identify with the nation which posits them outside of its national corpus, gays and lesbians develop particular strategies that enable them to reconcile the apparent contradiction. In this paper, by analyzing the self-narratives of Croatian gays and lesbians, I will explore how they differently resolve this paradox of belonging. In other words, by attending to the life stories, my aim is to examine whether and to what extent non-heterosexual people in Croatia re-conceptualize the dominant notions of “Croat”, “male/female” and “lesbian/gay” challenging in this way the very borders of national belonging.
Participant: Dr Duška Kneževi? Ho?evar
Sociomedical Institute SRC SASA
Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Slovenia
Email: duska@zrc-sazu.si
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Marriages across Slovenian- Croatian border: the case of Žumber?ani
The author of the proposed paper holds that locally bounded intermarrying among Žumber?ani (the locals from the Žumberak border region in Croatia) was common practice in the past century and a half. She presents her arguments analyzing the interviews with the informants and the archival material. The reasons for such in-group cross-border marriage strategies can be identified in the past ways of life of people from Žumberak. The major contingent analyzed are the uskoki of the Greek-Catholic religious affiliation living along what was in the past the Military Border Zone. Examined most closely are Žumber?ani from the most ancient Greek-Catholic parish in the region, in Radatovi?i, the westernmost
Žumberak parish situated at the Croat-Slovenian state border. In conclusion, the paper seeks to determine whether Žumber?ani have been marrying also cross the present border with Slovenia, with whom, and to what extent.
Participant: Ms Paola Monzini
Independent Researcher
Italy
Email: pao.monz@libero.it
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
The evolution of transnational prostitution in last 15 years: from trafficking in women to sex work? For this workshop I propose an analysis of the emergence of a cheap prostitution market based on the transnational movements of young migrant women both in Eastern and Western European countries, in last 20 years. Particularly, I can illustrate how the places driving this migratory movement – which are always those in which the greatest profits can be made -change over time. The first area for these movements emerges after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, on the margins of the EU, and it comprises the Czech Republic, Poland, and the Baltic states, with Western tourists coming for sexual tourism, and girls moving to the West. In few years, other geographical areas have been progressively interested, such as Kosovo, Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania. Also in these countries a broader migratory movement towards other European countries or overseas emerges, as well as a local cheap market for prostitution. Then, an expansion of the prostitution markets has been recorded
in countries further inland. Taking in mind these evolutions, and in the light of the recent debate on the prostitution transnational markets, the “trafficking in women” and “free sex workers” paradigms will be discussed. Attention will be on the evolution of the relationships among sex, borders and money.
Participant: Prof TuijaPulkkinen
Christina Institute for Women’s Studies
University of Helsinki
Finland
Email: tuija.pulkkinen@helsinki.fi
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Meeting Convenor
Participant: Dr Madeleine Reeves
Centre for Research in Socio-Cultural Change
University of Manchester
United Kingdom
Email: madeleine.reeves@manchester.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Manning the border: masculinity, violence, bordering
This proposal – still at an early stage of development – takes up a theme that I explored during my doctoral research on the relationship between violence, masculinity and the production of the border guard as an agent of the state’s ‘legitimate violence’. There I explored the question in more of an ethnographic direction, looking at the transformation of border guarding in the post- Soviet period, and the way in which gender figured in border encounters in specific Central Asian sites. Here I would be interested in contributing a conceptual paper (or wiki entry reviewing the relevant literature) looking
more broadly and comparatively at the relationship between gender and ideas of state territoriality. There is, I believe, a lacuna in the existing literature on borders in exploring the way in which masculine subjects and state territoriality come to be co-produced. In part, I suggest, this lacuna stems from a tendency to take the border as a given and that which crosses the border (rather than the work of bordering) to be the point of ethnographic interest; in part, perhaps, from the practical and ethical difficulties of doing research amongst those charged with enacting state territoriality – the border guards, customs officers, and other officials who animate the everyday borders of Europe’s eastern peripheries. By taking the trio of concepts, masculinity-violence- bordering, as my point of entry for a review of existing theoretical debates across anthropology, geography and gender studies, I hope to contribute to the workshop on two ways: firstly, by foregrounding the (gendered) work of bordering, thus contributing to a growing literature that has sought to dereify by studying its everyday enactments; and secondly (more tentatively, perhaps), to think about the place of violence and threat-of-
violence in enacting borders, whether spatial or social.
Participant:
Ms Michaela Schäuble
Institute for Social Anthroplogy
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg
Germany
Email: michaela.schaeuble@ethnologie.uni-halle.de
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Gender as marker of ethnic difference in the former Yugoslavia
In the course of my ethnographic fieldwork I have come to experience nationalism, regionalism, the increasing importance of so-called “authentic Dalmatian tradition” – and even the embodied perception of landscape and space – as highly gendered categories. Individual as well as communal identity construction in the peripheral Croatian-Bosnian border region is
constituted by the mutual embeddednes of gender, ethnicity, and (marginal) political status. The study of transitional processes, especially in times of raised national awareness, involves a detailed analysis of local notions of gender and personhood as situated positionings vis-à-vis other segments of the social, political and cultural life of a community as well as vis-à-vis urban centres of power and visions of the nation itself. This policy of gendering of the nation, and mobilising the potential for ethno-national “othering” contained in it, continues to inform current strategies of creating national solidarity throughout all the republics of the former Yugoslavia. I argue that present-day gender relations in Croatia – especially the recent strengthening of patriarchal gender constructs and traditional role allocation – also prove a battleground for different ways of remembering, understanding and (re-)position the country within the new Europe.
Participant:
Mr Paul Scheibelhofer
Gender Studies Department
Central European University
Hungary
Email: scheibelhofer_paul@phd.ceu.hu
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Sexuality, Race, Class and Masculinity – Intersectionality and the Study of Migrant Men
In Europe, discourses of gender and sexuality have become a productive mode of creating difference between “the West and the rest”– especially when it comes to Muslim migrants from the East. Feminist researchers have questioned the ideas of
oriental femininity and sexuality that these discourses create and have shown the diverse practices and positionalities of migrant women. Both in dominant discourses as well as in critical research, migrant men have gained less overt attention, although certain notions of “foreign masculinity” certainly inform discourses about migrant femininities and gender relations. The paper critically discusses these covert notions of migrant masculinity and develops a research frame on the basis of own and existing research on migrant men. This frame builds on notions of intersectionality as lately discussed in gender studies. In putting the two strands of research into dialogue, both the study of migrant masculinities as well as the paradigm of intersectionality are critically evaluated and developed further.
Participant: Dr May-Len Skilbrei
Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies
Norway
Email: mls@fafo.no
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Women/”others”/sexualities at the margins
Last year I headed a research project on prostitution in the Nordic countries. An important finding was that prostitution increasingly come to be associated with foreign women, while national women involved in prostitution are not in the same way brought into policy debates or are the target for interventions. The particular context of foreign women’s prostitution in the Nordic countries is the fact that prostitution as such is interpreted as a sign of lack of gender equality, representing the wrong sexuality and even construed as counterproductive to the Nordic states’ gender equality projects. In several European
countries, including most of the Nordic countries, non-Schengen citizens suspected of migrating to sell sexual services can be turned away at the border. People selling sex are thus the wrong type of migrants, at least when they come from the “outside”. Prostitution is more and more met with a differentiated response from European authorities linked to concepts of inside/outside, us/them, white/black and national/transnational. Through this, some prostitution is symbolically sanctioned by the State as it refrains from intervening, while certain forms of prostitution receive massive amounts of government control. In this paper I will explore who otherness is constructed in this in terms of the performance of gender, ethnicity and sexuality.
Participant: Dr Antu Sorainen
Christina Institute for Women's studies /PPhiG
University of Helsinki
Finland
Email: antu.sorainen@helsinki.fi
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Sexual Politics of Fear Crossing Legal Borders?
In Finland, a new law on blocking distribution of child-pornography on the internet was rushed through in the autumn 2006, and it came into force in the beginning of 2007. There was almost no parliamentary discussionor public critique around this turning-point law, which introduced censorship legislation into the Finnish criminal law system that has been liberal since the early 1970s. The implementation of the censorship legislation in the Finnish criminal law was thus an important political turn. Judith Levine (2002) calls this kind of politics the sexual politics of fear. It has, as its political and
legal effect, target and aim, reconstructed and mobilised the figure of the paedophile. The paedophile is, in this context, a figure that centrally organizes our ideas of ’sexual decency’. The figure of the paedophile is crucial in constructing contemporary standards of sexual morality. However, it has been constructed in such a way that a critical or analytical approach is almost inadmissible. Fear around the paedophile has been politicized, and the main effect of this is to enforce the idea that there are no political alternatives – fear is offered as a negative moral foundation for social order. This discourse tends to underline the concept of childhood innocence. However, in Finland, ‘innocence’ is not something that has been connected only with children, but also with the society. In my paper, I will analyse different constructions of, and the highly emotional and politicized attachments to, the figure of the paedophile in the UK and in Finland.
Participant: Dr Joni Virkkunen
Karelian Institute
University of Joensuu
Finland
Email: joni.virkkunen@joensuu.fi
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Sexuality, Territoriality and the Struggle for Purity: HIV/AIDS in Russian nationalist discourse
In the post- Soviet context, boundaries do not become significant only as physical territorial markers but also as ideological
elements in “othering”. By utilizing Joane Nagel’s (2003) theory of ethnosexual zones and boundaries, the study interprets the way that sexuality is used in Russian nationalism. The approach is especially fascinating in a context where both nationalism and sexuality are clearly influenced by and interrelated with wide and political and social change. In post-Soviet Russia, sexuality related issues liberalised and led to sexual experiments and to a rise of various non-hegemonic forms of sexualities. During the last few years, however, the strengthening Russian nationalism has activated and unified diverse social groups to promote “real” Russianness and to fight against immorality and “pervert lifestyle” that are – in Russian discourse – often said to have its roots in outside, in the West. The paper looks at the post-Soviet Russian bordering through sexuality. Paying a particular attention to the prevailing HIV/AIDS epidemic in Russia, the paper aims to not only to see how a disease like HIV/AIDS is viewed in Russia but, especially, how that is purposely related to the above described
nationalist argumentation. (* I will participate this event even without the financial support of COST)