Invitation to the online IPW Lecture Rebordering Europe: Theorizing the Second Other in Gender Studies
Lecturer: Teresa Kulawik (Södertörn University)
Moderation: Birgit Sauer (IPW | University of Vienna)
When: Wednesday, 14 April 2021, 18:30
Where: Online - direct access link
Abstract:
The lecture explores the velvet border in European gender studies three decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain. While the edgy East–West divide of the early years has certainly been refined within a field now established as transnationally European, a West-centric skew continues to permeate feminist knowledge production within a geopolitical space in which the positionality of Eastern Europe has transmuted from the Second World to the second Other of Europe. The presentation recasts genealogies of academic and transnational feminisms.
A critical ‘reclaiming work’ reveals not only that Western trajectories as the universal model underlie today’s stories, but also that the perspective of the ‘winners’, as a progress narrative, erases the conditions of its own emergence. After 1989, a new taxonomy of feminist knowledge emanated from processes in which the canonization and professionalization of gender studies, theoretical upheavals, and geopolitics became inextricably linked. Rather than dwelling on the East–West dichotomy, I seek to dislocate it and shifting the epistemic landscape, launching a critical analytical perspective of Europe as borderland. At the core of the proposed argument is a profound rethinking of time-space relations through the embedment of the East–West demarcation in a broader perspective of historical and contemporary global entanglements. This enables us to consider, in a novel way, hierarchizations and processes of re-bordering within Europe as well as efforts to problematize epistemic categories that imprudently reproduce asymmetries.
An event within the IPW Lectures, an international lecture series of the Department for Political Science, University of Vienna.
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