Keynote Lecture: Troubling Gender? Post-Essentialist Anxieties and their political potential
- Prof. Dr. Paula Villa
Gender has become a trigger, a primer for harsh, often emotionally loaded general debates. Gender has also become a core element in political mobilizations, especially within neo-authoritarian, populist contexts: “Anti-Genderism” is very much part of policies in e.g. Hungary, Poland, Brazil, and of political platforms such as the AfD in Germany. How has “gender” become such a loaded term? What is at stake in contemporary “culture wars”, and the intense media coverage? The talk will address these questions by trying to understand the cultural and political anxieties - left and right, and in between - the concept “gender” actually generates within our contemporary social condition, and by discussing some tricky troubles the notion of gender carries within itself. The idea is to discuss the seemingly paradoxical post-essentialist quality of that thing called “gender”.
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Prof. Dr. Paula Villa
Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Institute for Sociology
Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky is full professor and chair for Sociology and Gender Studies at LMU München, and mother of two. She's elected member of the board of the German Sociological Association (DGS; since 2013), and will preside the DGS from April 2021 on. Villa Braslavsky has served as elected board member of the German Association for Gender Studies from 2010 - 2014.
Her research focuses on the analysis of biopolitics, i.e. the ambivalent entanglements of society and soma, on Cultural Studies (Pop and Politics, Embodiment within Subcultures such as Tango), on Care & Gender, and on Science/Academia and Gender. She's published widely on gender/social theory (post-structuralism, Butler, Bourdieu, symbolic violence), the sociology of embodiment, beautification and normalization, on feminist body politics, and on German and Europan “anti-genderism” as part of new nationalist populism.
She has (co-)authored 11 books and over 50 journal articles. Her most recent publication is “The Future of Difference. Beyond the Toxic Entanglement of Racism, Sexism and Feminism.” Verso Books June 2020 (with Sabine Hark); https://www.versobooks.com/books/3177-the-future-of-difference. Her funded empirical research (e.g. DFG, VW, Humboldt foundations) has dealt with Cosmetic Surgery, Food/Fitness, comparative analysis of Gender Equality Programs in academic capitalism, Care & Gender.
Contributors
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Prof. Dr. Paula Villa
Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Institute for Sociology
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