Feminism and Activism

WORKSHOP 1

Gender: Image, Media and Technologies

Group: Alex Plows Chiara Bonfiglioli Ilana Mountian Nancy Bottner Maria José Guerra Maria Nuria

Gender: Image, Media and Technologies

This workshop envisages the discussion of gender in relation to image, media and technologies. Taking into account power imbalance historically constructed and still reproduced in contemporary social/political contexts, we aim to look at how specific power dynamics operate in relation to gender and new forms of imagetic, representational, and communicational fields. Two main perspectives that overlap among them are sought here: first, issues related to cyber/technology and gender (e.g. cyberfeminism, “cyborgs”, virtual reality, technophobia), and second, issues related to sexual politics of new enhancements (e.g. cosmetic surgery and new reproductive technologies such as IVF, surrogate mothering). Key questions bring these issues together: are technologies (science) gendered? How does gender operate within these new technologies? What are the current feminist discussions on these issues and what would be a possible way of performing feminist standpoints in science and technologies? How are new technologies working for feminist issues? How gender is produced and reproduced (represented) within media technologies?

Contributions for this workshop are brought by different approaches to this field:

• Gender and Social Imaginary: Deconstructing images of gender and drug use (women’s position in discourse and social regulation) – Ilana Mountian. • Feminist critique of bioethics: reproductive autonomy and eugenics. María José Guerra • Seize the tools! – the cyborg as subversive intervention and its reflection in popular culture – Nancy Bottner • Cyberfeminism, new tecnologies and women - Nuria • Feminist discourse on the sexual politics of cosmetic surgery – Alex Plows • Cyborg, technofobia, ecofeminism – Chiara Bonfiglioli

WORKSHOP 2

Gender and Violence

We propose here a workshop to discuss the theme of gender and violence. There are crucial aspects to be brought up for discussion and a necessity for a change in specific forms of power relationships. For this workshop we welcome all issues related to this vast field. For this reason we read violence not only in terms of physical violence, but rather we include symbolic violence, borrowing the term from Bourdieu (1975), which positions the subject in specific dominant social discourses. Hence, the work of Foucault (1991) on the notion of the gaze provides further scope for this analysis. The gaze is understood as a surveillance that enables us to qualify, classify and punish. Such practices establish over individuals a “visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them” (p.184). How do these dynamics operate in gender perspectives?

This workshop will be looking at 4 main themes: • “Othering”: Boundaries in gender. How specific social dynamics operate in relation to gender (e.g. pleasure) – Ilana Mountian • Community and young male offenders issues of violence and alternatives – Alison Ronan • Homosexuality and homophobia: homophobia as symbolic violence against homosexual people and its relations to misogyny - Amilcar Torrão Filho

Group: Alison Ronan, Amilcar Torao, Ilana Mountian, Letsie Lehobang

WORKSHOP 3

SUBJECT: Queer activism, porno feminism, sexual work.

KEY WORDS: queer activism (or post-identity politics); post-pornography (or the representation of sexuality); sexual work; cyborgs identities.

AIMS: In the context of sexual practices and the representation of sexuality from a post identity perspective, our aims will /could be:

   * share, create and support experiences and nodes between activists (locally and globally)
   * create and support bonds between activism and research
   * discuss the relationships between activism and the institutions (how to take care of the tensions between the struggle for a livable world and the institutional vampirism)
   * set off fractal ramification of the encounter (new bonds or links, internet forums, etc…)

POSSIBLE SUBJECTS AND DYNAMICS:

   * In front of and behind the camera eye: gaze and representation of sexuality. Possible proposal:
         o workshop to create a porno short movie
         o cine forum with movies brought by participants
   * DIY: workshop on do-it-yourself sexual material
   * On the embodiment of practices: dis/Encounters between feminism and queer activism (Corpus Deleicti from Barcelona. Participation confirmed)
   * ……….
   * ………….
         o Include your proposal on the blanks!!!!

WORKSHOP 4

Precariousness: a new common ground?

The aim of this Workshop is to start a common reflection (possibly, between many and different women) focusing on the ambivalent, unclear and potential character of the issue of precariousness/flexibility, stemming from the transformations of work, time and life as we daily experience it. To investigate the issue of precariousness as a condition that affects our life in its entirety provides an enormous ground to be explored. The interconnections between the transformations of labour market and family, and the links between migration and globalization processes, will constitute the starting point of our analysis.

Our purpose is to bring to the Workshop some concrete examples of collective reflections and practices about these issues, and to try to support a dialogue and a comparison between the various members, subjects, positions and experiences that will be involved.

The “Sconvegno” group from Italy will present an experimental transnational work-in-progress for a monographic number of “Feminist Review” on Italian Feminisms and the challenge of precariousness, that will be published in 2007.

Furthermore, we would like to engage with the issue of precarity in relation to women’s migrations in Europe, outlining some of the current debates on globalization and the feminization of migration and labour, drawing on research in Athens with several antiracist and women migrants’ groups.

We would like to share with others our experiences, and “contaminate/get contaminated” in this process (still ongoing) for developing new common language(s) and frame(s) for a feminist analysis on these themes. Hopefully, this Workshop could represent one step of the path!

WORKSHOP 5

Title: Dangerous liaisons? Bonds among Activism-Feminism – Women

Taking back an old question that our common sense already proposed in the 70s: “ Is it possible that men and women can be friends?” We suggest to revise the links between feminism and women, , their tie potential; the risks they have of transforming themselves in vanguard-rearguard ; the need and the theoretic- practical justification to keep this “ difference” ; the kinds of “benefits” and consequences this distinction has.

To avoid this confrontation not among us, women, but from the point of view of the social relations in which we see examples of those links between feminism and women, we propose to focus on four points:

- In the cinema language: emancipation models/ ways of subjectivation. - In the literature language: emancipation models/ ways of subjectivation. - In the adverts language : from an object base to a subject function. - In our daily life: wandering around groups, splitting up in foreign affairs.

We suggest those four topics, considered as being the material stand for a practical exchange between them, men and us, women.

We propose the dynamics of an experience-based workshop, not as an essay about our subjective positions, but as a way of experimenting those cultural backgrounds which support us at the same time that they captive us. If some others spoke about thinking on the outside, with no subject, we propose to experience the outside.

If there were some words left during this experimentation, we propose to re-write them collectively as a transferential summary of what happened.

Rachel Sánchez Alba Bosch Liliana Ferrari

WORKSHOP 6

(not clarified yet)