Details
Gender (in a Time of) Trouble: Studying Slavic Sexualities Now
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Princeton University
September 30 – October 1, 2022
Over the last three decades, Slavic Studies has been engaged in an active conversation about gender and sexuality in the cultures of Eurasia and Eastern Europe. Women’s writing was explored; cinematic masculinity was theorized; the Soviet feminist legacy was re-examined. Benefiting from the ongoing debates about sexual difference, performative gender, and intersectional identities, scholars have been successfully questioning established cultural binaries and social assumptions.
Using the legacy of this scholarship as a point of departure, this symposium aims to identify new conceptual paths and research trajectories for thinking about genders and sexualities within contemporary Slavic Studies. In part, we want to redefine the link between history and method by investigating how imperialist politics and nationalist ideologies – now and in the past – have been shaping representations of genders in visual and printed cultures, performing arts, literature, philosophy, and aesthetics. Crucially, we want to see how empire and nationalism have impacted conceptual frameworks and theoretical approaches within gender and sexuality studies.
What new fields of inquiry could gender studies help us to access now? What forms of intellectual engagement could the studies of sexualities precipitate today? To what extent could (predominantly Western) theories of gender and sexuality be used as analytical lenses for decolonizing the field of Slavic Studies?
The symposium seeks conceptually innovative and empirically grounded presentations across disciplines, including the fields of art and graphics, film and theater, media and literature, history and philosophy and all fields that would showcase the interpretative significance and conceptual efficacy of gender and sexuality for studying Slavic cultures (broadly conceived).
PRELIMINARY PROGRAM:
September 30, 2022
Dinara Yangeldina (The Centre for Women's and Gender Research, University of Bergen)
Beard Against the West: (non)Russian Hip-Hop Masculinities Confronting Sexual Perversion
Brett Donohoe (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University)
The Benefits of Ahistoricism: Wings, Queer Historiography, and our Debt to the Dead
Philip Gleissner (Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, The Ohio State University)
City Hustlers vs. Village Teachers: The Spatial Management of Queer Sexualities in Central Europe
Ira Roldugina (Department of History, University of Pittsburgh)
Speaking for Themselves: Decolonizing Early Soviet Queer
Anna Dżabagina (University of Warsaw)
Sapphic Empire. Lesbian Writings in Polish, Ukrainian & Russian Modernism
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Helena Goscilo
Slavists and Slavs on Gender and Sexuality: Kratkii Kurs
– Or the Nutshell Version
OCTOBER 1, 2022
Kaitlyn Sorenson (Binghamton University, SUNY)
Actually Existing Women: On Theoretical Code-Switching in Alenka Zupančič’s Sexuality and Ontology
Petar Odak (Gender Studies, Central European University & Utrecht University)
“We Hate More, But We Love More”: Post/Socialist Subjects and Gender Politics between the Communal and the Individual
Mari Jarris (Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)
The Unhappy Marriage of Imperialism & Feminism
Irina Denischenko (Department of Slavic Languages and the Women's and Gender Studies Program, Georgetown University)
Feminism Without a Past? Contemporary Russian Fem-Poetry and the Soviet Legacy
Maria Corrigan (The Department of Visual and Media Arts & the Comedic Arts Program, Emerson College)
Wives, Beards, and Widows: Surrogate Labor and Soviet Film
KEYNOTE ADDRESS:
Olga Hasty (Princeton U)
Permutations of Erasure: Reimagining Counteractive Strategies