Events

• A Murder Over a Girl - seminar with Ken Corbett (NYU)
  21st May  2pm - 4pm Room B03, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD
  Discussants: Daniel Monk (School of Law, Birkbeck) and Stephen Frosh (Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck)
  Organised by the Department of Psychosocial Studies and the Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality (BiGS)
  This event is free - first come first served

• Sexology and Translation: Scientific and Cultural Encounters in the Modern World 1860-1930 - Symposium
  14th - 15th  June 2012 Keynes Library, School of Arts, Birkbeck.
  This symposium turns attention to the evidence of global scientific and cultural exchange during the first phase of sexology, c1860-1930, and its significance. It is well known that sexology was fashioned across cultural as well as scientific contexts, mostly within Europe but notably also by establishing networks of scholarly exchange in and with, for example, the U.S.. Less attention has been paid to a distinguishing feature of many sexological texts: the fact that they are highly intertextual, and were translated quickly into other languages or indeed read in the original language by non-native speakers. International reader responses in turn fed back into revised editions of the texts, producing a unique textual archive that allows us both to chart the transnational development of the discipline and to trace how individual lives unfolded in relation to broader scientific and political debates over a period of seventy years.
  Sexology and Translation brings into dialogue an international group of experts from literature, history, translation studies, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology and politics who will map, compare and examine alongside each other a diverse range of nationally-specific discourses of sex and explore their transnational connections. Specifically, the symposium will cover discussions of the traditional centres of sexological research (UK, Germany, Italy, France and the Netherlands) and their exchange with less frequently studied but equally important areas in and on the borders of Europe and beyond, including Switzerland, Finland, Russia, China, Japan, the US and the Middle East.  By rethinking the relationship between the hubs of sexological research and its margins, the symposium aims to gain fresh insights into the flow of information between culture and science, and between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’ around the turn of the last century.
  Confirmed speakers include:
  Heike Bauer (Birkbeck), Brian James Baer (Kent State University) Chiara Beccalossi (Birkbeck), Kirsti Bohata (Swansea), Sean Brady (Birkbeck), Howard Chiang (Princeton), Peter Cryle (Queensland), Jana Funke (Exeter), Natalia Gerodotti (Leeds Metropolitan), Gert Hekma (Amsterdam), Liat Kozma (Hebrew University), Birgit Lang (Melbourne), Sally Newman (Monash), Ofer Nur (Tel Aviv University), Anna Katharina Schaffner (University of Kent), Antu Soreinen (Helsinki University), Elizabeth Stephens (Queensland), Michiko Suzuki  (Indiana University), Katie Sutton (Melbourne), James Wilper (Birkbeck).
  For more information please contact the organizer: Dr Heike Bauer
  
  

• Beyond Queering the Chain of Care: Affective Feminizations and Transnational Transgender Surgeries
  3rd July  6pm - 7.30  Room 101, 30 Russell Sq
  Speaker: Dr Aren Z. Aizura, (Rutgers University)
  Discussants: Silvia Posocco (Dept. of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck) & Sarah Lamble (School of Law, Birkbeck).
  The “affective turn” has deliberatively reached some agreement that affective labour is neither new nor paradigmatic of postfordism—and that women, and in particular women in the global south, are the historical subjects of affective labour. However, less attention has been paid to how the performance of affective work is increasingly disarticulated from bodies recognizable as biologically female, and from a reliance on womanhood as the natural repository of feminized affect. Martin Manalansan’s observations in “Queering the Chain of Care” begin such a task. But what are the implications of this observation? What are the forms of racialized gendering that enable all kinds of bodies to perform queered affective labours? What gendered, sexual and racialized social relations are taking shape through such affective labour practices? This paper draws on fieldwork in a Thai gender reassignment surgery clinic catering to mainly white, non-Thai trans women to think through these questions. Beginning with a paradox of affect—white trans women patients report feeling very well cared for, while Thai and Vietnamese trans women patients report feeling isolated and neglected—this paper reads theories of orientalism and self-orientalism, affective labour and biopolitical subjectivity against transgender studies to provoke affective labor theory to “queer” itself.