Representation, Materiality and Gender:
Contemporary and Historical Reconfigurations of Gender Relations

What socialisation mechanisms are at work during adolescence in relation to the development of gender and sexuality? How do same-sex parents or single parents navigate the hegemonic norm of parenthood? What significance does intersexuality hold in contemporary American literature, and how is it portrayed? And: if ‘German’ is regarded as a ‘white’ language, what agency do Women of Colour have to express themselves within it? These are just some of the research questions that early-career researchers have addressed as part of their doctoral and postdoctoral projects during the third phase of the Basel graduate research programme. 

For the current reshaping of gender relations is proving to be multifaceted, diverse and complex. Furthermore, gender relations are characterised by a paradoxical coexistence of change and persistence, an in-depth analysis of which is as yet largely lacking. From a historical perspective, however, such phases of fundamental reshaping recur time and again. It is also important to establish links with global (both European and non-European) processes of transformation and to take their intercultural dimension into account. The research projects brought together within the Graduate Research Programme ‘Representation, Materiality and Gender’ address these processes of transformation and examine the following thematic areas:

• changes in the relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, for example in relation to contemporary attempts to develop a non-essentialist understanding of materiality and corporeality (following, amongst other things, Critical Theory) and the shifting interactions between scientific theories and society
• shifting and mutually influential representations of gender, such as discourses on the body in literature and film
• processes of social transformation in gender relations, including within non-hegemonic ways of life, in higher education and in the media

Events

2009

| Representations of Materiality & Physicality
Main event with Kerstin Palm

2010

|Persistence and Change in Gender Relations
Main event with Andrea Maihofer, Claudia Opitz Belakhal and Regina Wecker

| körper_tänze
Workshop

| ‘Between Difference and Equality – An Overview of a Debate’ 
Opening lecture by Patricia Purtschert (University of Zurich), part of the lecture series “Normalisation and Othering – Debates on Equality and Difference”

|‘Economics and Gender’
Double lecture and workshop with Katharina Pühl (Humboldt University of Berlin) and Antke Engel (Institute for Queer Theory, Hamburg/Berlin), part of the lecture series “Normalisation and Othering – Debates on Equality and Difference”

2011

| ‘Affects – Public Feelings and the Politics of Emotions’
Double lecture and workshop with Ann Cvetkovich (University of Texas, Austin) and Heather Love (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), part of the lecture series “Normalisation and Othering – Debates on Equality and Difference”

|“Citizenship – Representation – Democracy”
Double lecture and workshop with Erna Appelt (University of Innsbruck) and Jin Haritaworn (University of Helsinki), part of the lecture series “Normalisation and Othering – Debates on Equality and Difference”

|“Critical Whiteness – The Visible Self”
Double lecture & workshop with Fatima El-Tayeb (University of California, San Diego) and Gabriele Dietze (Humboldt University of Berlin), part of the lecture series “Normalisation and Othering – Debates on Equality and Difference”

|“(Gender) Difference: an obsolete category? – Conclusions and Outlooks”
Closing lecture by Andrea Maihoferpart of Normalisation and Othering – Debates on Equality and Difference, part of the lecture series “Normalisation and Othering – Debates on Equality and Difference”

| Reframing Gender, Reframing Critique
International conference, University of Basel