Event — Seminar

Beyond Gender and Sexuality

24 May 2007

24/05/2007 - 10:00

24 May 2007
10.00-17.00 hrs.

Research seminar in cooperation with Mosse Foundation.

Discussants

Josephine Ho Now Chair of the English Department, National Central University, Taiwan and President of the Cultural Studies Association, Taiwan, Josephine Ho has been intensely involved in the burgeoning counter-cultural movement as well as the feminist movement since her return to Taiwan in 1988 after receiving two doctorates from US universities. As perhaps the best-known feminist scholar in Taiwan, she later founded the Center for the Study of Sexualities at National Central University in 1995, widely-recognized for both its activism and its intellectual stamina. The Center's annual conferences have been continuously opening up social space for marginal issues in gender/sexuality-related theory and research. Josephine Ho herself has been writing both extensively and provocatively on many cutting-edge issues in the Taiwanese context, spearheading sex-positive views on female sexuality, gender/sexuality education, queer studies, sex work studies and activism, transgenderism, and most recently body modification, which greatly enhanced and challenged Taiwanese academic research into marginal gender/sexualities. For her tireless effort in resisting bigotry and prejudice, and her work on human rights and sex rights, she was selected as one among the thousand women from all over the world who are collectively nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.

Yin-bin Ying is Professor Graduate Institute of Philosophy National Central University Chungli, Taiwan. Ph.D. in Philosophy, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA.  MA. in Philosophy, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada  See also http://sex.ncu.edu.tw/members/Ning/resume-english.html

Helen Hok-Sze Leung received a B.A. in English from Oxford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She teaches in the areas of gender studies, queer theory, feminist theory, cultural studies, film and literary studies. Her research interests include Asian cinemas; Chinese literature; Hong Kong cultural studies; queer politics; minority gender and sexual practices; nationalism and postcolonial issues. Her book Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong is currently under review with UBC Press .

Song Hwee Lim's principal areas of research are transnational Chinese cinemas and world cinemas. His first book, Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (University of Hawaii Press, 2006) is situated at the crossroads of gender and sexuality studies, film and cinemas studies, and area (Chinese) studies, and is also informed by cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and critical theory. My next book project is on Tsai Ming-liang and a cinema of slowness.

Niko Besnier is Chair of Cultural Anthropology in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam. He has also taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1986-88), Yale University (1989-95), Victoria University of Wellington (1996-2002), and UCLA (2002-05). Niko Besnier is currently devoting his research attention to an in-depth investigation of masculinity, transnationalism, and transgenderism in Tonga, an analysis of gender and modernity in Tonga and in diasporic Tongan communities from political, economic, and socio-cultural perspectives. The fieldwork was conducted in two locations: Nuku'alofa, the capital of Tonga, and Auckland, New Zealand, where a substantial Tongan migrant community resides. Funding for this project was provided by the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand and the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Niko Besnier has held visiting appointments or fellowships at the University of Hawai'i, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, University of Auckland, and Kagoshima University. He has been on the editorial board of a number of journals in anthropology, gender & sexuality studies, and linguistics, including, currently, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Oceania, Oceanic Linguistics, Paideusis, Journal of Sociolinguistics, and Gender and Language. He is Member-at-Large for the Society of Linguistic Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. He served as Chair of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania in 1995-96, and Chief Examiner in Social and Cultural Anthropology for the International Baccalaureate in 1998-2003.

Prof. Gloria Wekker is a social and cultural anthropologist (UCLA, 1992), specializing in Women's Studies, African American Studies, and Caribbean Studies.
Currently she holds the IIAV-chair in gender and ethnicity in the faculty
of the Arts at Utrecht University and is the director of GEM, the Center
of Expertise on Gender, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism in Higher
Education, at the same university.
Her doctoral dissertation "I Am a Gold Coin; The Construction of Selves, Gender
and Sexualities in a Female, Working-Class, Afro-Surinamese Setting" which
centered on constructions of sexual subjectivity among Creole
working-class women in Suriname blossomed into a longitudinal and
transcontinental project (1990 - 2002). "The Politics of Passion; Women's
sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora" published by Columbia
University Press (2006) has anchored these preoccupations within a
diasporic setting.

Gert Hekma teaches gay and lesbian studies in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the UvA. His specialism is sociology and history of (homo)sexuality -- see his publications. His teaching is in the same field where he is responsible for the BA-track gender, sexuality and culture. See under "education" the courses he is teaching. He co-organized several conference f.e. Among Men, Among Women (1983), Organizing Sexuality (1994),Queer Sports (1998), Sexual Cultures in Europe and smaller ones on the Marquis de Sade, masturbation, the history of sexology, the rise of the gay and lesbian movement and same-sex marriage. He now works on an encyclopedia of perversions, on the Dutch poet Jacob Israel de Haan, on discrimination of gays and lesbians in The Netherlands, on sex capitals and on a comparison of gay emancipation after WW II in various Western countries.