This panel is postponed due to participants’ incapacity. It had to be hosted by Altersea (Backup: SEA-Junction) and to be chaired by Silvia Vignato (UNIMIB)
Panel 6 – Subjectivities & Subjugation (Gender)
In front of discrimination or naturalization processes, how do women and minority genders build strategies, invent solutions, negotiate and make compromises to make their voice heard, protect their bodies, and open new ways of expressing the plural components of their identity?
In what conditions do inter-individual and inter-social relations contribute to cohabitation and equitability? How can we foster cosmopolitanism, intergenerational solidarities, and gender inclusiveness as assets for a common, desirable and sustainable future?
- In a classical sense, we will reflect on how gender, generation, class, and race, among other axes of power, intersect, making certain individuals or groups more prone to experiencing discrimination.
- The dominant ideology of liberal economy and performance can have perverse effects when, in order to encourage the autonomy of women, social minorities, and poor sectors of the population it formulates an injunction that enforces and paralyzes the roles assigned to each. In parallel, behind certain postures of protest, the mobilization of concepts such as gender, race, and class can make the realities to which they relate seem natural and thereby reinforce certain dominant logics. The contributors address the complexity of these different situations in order to understand how certain modes of protest also reflect forms of incorporation, interiorizing assigned places, and norms defined by dominant ideological systems.
- Through the promotion of individual responsibility, liberal discourse and action can result in the State neglecting to protect its citizens’ collective rights. In the frame of liberal ideology, the individual is encouraged to be his own manager, taking charge of his health, career, wealth, sexuality, and gender. Still, does the system really change, reorganize hierarchies and provide individuals with the possibility to be emancipated from their conventional roles?
- In some national contexts, the figure of the foreigner is caricatured as a veiled woman wearing a burqa who must remain locked in her home so as not to disturb the indigenous public space. In other cases, women are exemplified and identified with notions of care and altruism. Pointing out anti models and normalizing identities can have similar effects: the image of the emancipated woman can become a tool for subjugation that identifies particular models with a specific gender, class, and race and then fosters inequalities and the control of social categories designated as exterior or different.