Gender studies

June 9th, 16:15-18:00

Open lecture with Cynthia Kraus:
I Am Myself and Nobody Else Is Like Me: Think Twice, If You Don't Want to Wake Up Pregnant!
Location: Room Temcas, Tema Building, Linköping University
Language: English

Abstract:
In this paper, I would like to discuss the current and widely shared assumption that idiosyncratic arguments about who we are and how each of us becomes a unique individual, work critically against biological and social determinisms, but for the best interests of political minorities. The ways in which intersex and trans’ activists with a feminist and queer political agenda have sought to challenge standards of care and the very definition of their “disorders” by mobilizing plastic and idiosyncratic knowledge claims from studies about the intersexed and transsexual brain are a case in point. This example confronts us with the need to reflect critically on the undercuts of arguments about plasticity, individual variation, idiosyncrasy, and the like. One needs in particular to consider how the apparently emancipatory discourse about one’s uniqueness is no way out of “medicalization,” that it also promotes an ambivalent politics of self-realization and a problematic theory of agency. Further, as neuroscience has become one of the most productive sites for the proliferation and recognition of unique and ever-changing personal identities – the plastic subject –, it also makes sense to ask: in an emerging “plastic era,” how does the political argument of gender trouble, of feminism and the subversion of identity (Judith Butler, 1990) work today?