Keynote speakers

Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University, the Netherlands

Sarah Franklin, London School of Economics, UK
Marja-Liisa Honkasalo, Linkping University, Sweden
Priscilla Wald, Duke University, USA
www.helsinki.f/genderstudies/conference
Organized by
Gender Studies / Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and
Art Studies / University of Helsinki
Contact information
Tel. +358 9 191 24205
Fax. +358 9 191 23315
christina-conference@helsinki.f
And the research project
Representing and Sensing Nature, Landscape and Gender /
Academy of Finland
Erika Alm
Ume University
Sweden


Feminist Readings of Intersex Materiality

This paper explores the theoretical field commonly referred to as new materialism
and the theoretical discussions generated within feminist academia through a specific
case study: intersex bodies. Intersex bodies have, historically, been described in
dehumanizing and pathologizing terms.

Feminist scholars have worked hard, alongside intersex activists and clinicians, to
challenge these descriptions, and reform the medical management of intersex;
challenging not only the biomedical framing of intersex, through questioning the very
concept of sexual dimorphism, but also the psychological theories underpinning intersex
management, such as the assumption that an intersex child might develop a
problematic (i.e. not stable) gender identity if corrective surgery
is delayed. In other words: within feministic discourse intersex bodies have been a site
for the problematization of dichotomies like nature/culture, sex/gender, and body/mind.
Intersex bodies have been construed as nomadic bodies; understood through the
phenomenological concept of dys-appearing; framed as targets for foucauldian
biopower; and highlighted as the ultimate example of human bodies being sexed
through social processes of gendering.

This paper will focus on some of these conceptualizations and compare notes on the
materiality of otherness. How is the material reality of intersex individuals framed within
these different approaches? The common notion being that intersex bodies pose a
threat to sexual dimorphism and that there is a lesson to be learned from the cruel
treatment of intersex individuals, how do scholars deal with the equally common notion
that there is a subversive potential in the very corporeality of intersex, without
diminishing the lived experience of the intersex? Drawing on the works of feminist re-
readings of Freuds and Lacans notions of the materiality and corporeality of psychic
processes (J udith Butler, Gayle Salamon and Elizabeth Wilson) I also want to explore
the possibilities of transgressing the dichotomy of materiality and signification, as helpful
in understanding intersex experience.
Dee Amy-Chinn
University of Stirling
United Kingdom


Doing Justice to Semenya

I would like to take my point of departure from a question of power, the power
of regulation, a power that determines, more or less, what we are, what we
can be. (Butler, 2004: 57)

My point of departure is the controversy which arose in August 2009 when South
African athlete Caster Semenya finished well ahead of her rivals to become the
womens 800m World Champion, following which the International Association of
Athletics Federations required that she be tested to ascertain whether or not she was
a woman, and therefore entitled to compete. The results of this have yet to be
made public but in the subsequent media coverage what was seen to be at fault
was nature, which had somehow failed to ensure that Semenya was a true woman,
despite her uncontested female birth certificate and upbringing. The possibility that
the issue was a culture that insisted that one must be either man or woman was
absent from the discourse even though athletics officials recognised that the
question of sex determination was extremely complex, difficult, and that years of
effort had yet to produce any test able to provide a definitive answer to the question
is it a boy or a girl?. This paper will draw on feminist/queer theories of the body and
biology to reframe the debate as an issue of culture by interrogating the investment
of the athletics authorities in seeing sexual difference as binary, and ask if a more
nuanced approach that integrates both nature and culture, and frames sexual
difference as non-binary, is needed if we are to do justice to Semenya.

References:
Butler, J udith (2004) Doing J ustice to Someone, in Undoing Gender, London:
Routledge.

Irn Annus
University of Szeged
Hungary


Gender in the Cultural Landscape: Representations for Tourist Consumption

Arguably representing one of the more prominent postmodern industries, tourism is
structured around elaborate dynamisms of othering and self-othering, through which
the self-representation of potential tourist destinations being part of the daily lived
experience for the locals provides fertile soil for mapping given national
assumptions and realities regarding gender. The presentation investigates some of
these in recent (1) images that promote Hungary for tourists and (2) particular
moments that have shaped the cultural landscape key to local tourism in the
southern Hungarian town of Szeged. Drawing on certain theoretical positionings
proposed by Raymond Williams, Zygmunt Bauman, Griselda Pollock, J ohn Urry,
Gillian Rose, Cara Aitchison, and Mona Domosh, among others, the paper aims to
map how the dichotomy of nature/female and culture/male appears in these
representations within the cultural landscape, which, in certain ways, combines
nature and culture in a complex manner. The presentation argues that the trends
that can be detected in these areas of self-representation in fact faithfully reflect the
overall changes that have taken place in terms of gender relations and equality in
other areas in Hungary since the regime change twenty years ago.
Annette Arlander
Theatre Academy
Finland


Performing Landscape as Affirmative Practice

In Affirming the affirmative: On Nomadic Affectivity Rosi Braidotti has called for a
revision of the subject in terms of an eco-philosophical integration into his/her
environment (rhizomes 11/12, 2005/2006). According to Elisabeth Grosz feminism
needs to return to something that makes it feel happier as well as productive; small
pockets of knowledge production and art production provide a counter weight to the
oppressiveness of everyday life. So we need to affirm, we need a place where we
can simply affirm. (Interview by Kontturi & Tiainen, NORA Vol 15, 2007) Regardless
of the contested character of the notion, nature or the living environment is
something many people, including the writer of this text, want to affirm.

Performance and nature have been combined as Nature Performed (Szerszynski,
Heim & Waterton 2003), as Performing Nature (Giannachi & Stewart 2005), as
Performance and Place (Hill & Paris 2006) and as Theatre Ecology (Kershaw 2007).
This presentation describes and discusses one possible practice, based on long
term artistic work involving landscape (i.e. Arlander in Mkinen & Mntymki 2008).

Performing landscape by choosing a place and returning to it regularly, serves as an
example of an affirmative practice, which is available to artists and non-artists alike.
This kind of repetition provides an opportunity to rest and reflect; and if documented
a record of the constant changes taking place. The traces can be used as artworks,
like i.e. Year of the Rat Mermaid (2008). Affirmation comes into play in choosing
the place and in repeating the choice. Nature or a more or less living environment,
and an action emphasising the sensual experience of that environment increases the
joyful, healing and affirmative qualities of the practice.

J . Edgar Bauer
Germany


Queerness and the Lavishness of Nature: On Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's
Deployment of Magnus Hirschfeld's Concept of Drittes Geschlecht.

The presentation focuses on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet
(1990) and its treatment of sexologist and sexual minority rights activist Magnus
Hirschfeld (1868-1935). While relatively brief, Sedgwick's recourse to Hirschfeld
marks a salient move in the articulation of her historical and epistemic core
premises. In her view, Hirschfeld's oeuvre exemplifies paradigmatically the (sexual)
minoritizing and (gender) transitivity models of homosexual definition. Therewith, he
contributed to bring about the "incoherent dispensation" that frames the culturally
pervasive binaries Sedgwick explores as the basis for her readings of Henry J ames
and Marcel Proust. Since the assumption that the sexologist was a "believer in the
'third sex'" is crucial to Sedgwick's overall argumentative strategy, the presentation
examines closely the secondary textual sources invoked in Epistemolgy as
supporting evidence, and shows how they contradict Hirschfeld's explicit postulation
of universal sexual intermediariness, in correspondence with Charles Darwin's
ground premise: "Every man & woman is hermaphrodite." Positing the third-sex
alternative only as a "makeshift" intended to open up the closures of the sexual
dichotomy to an essentially de-totalized and de-totalizing series of unique and
potentially infinite sexualities, Hirschfeld's sexuelle Zwischenstufenlehre unsettles,
on principle, the reductive deployment of a hypostatized third sex as a handy
template for analyzing discursivities and their undergirding power structures. On this
account, Hirschfeld's non-essentialist conceptualization of sexual diversity deriving
from a Brunian/Spinozian grasp of ever-creative natura naturans necessitates a
revision of Sedgwick's basic categorial instrumentalities. Reminding that the
Hirschfeldian emancipatory program envisions the unfolding of inexhaustible sexual
forms within a libertarian-conceived history that resonates with the insights outlined
in Sedgwick's essay "Queer and Now," the presentation concludes with an
assessment of her perceptive elaborations on the semiosis of haecceitas as
resumed in the Buddhist topos of the "finger pointing at the moon."

Maria Dorn
University of Hamburg
Germany


Gendered Temporality: Woman on the Edge of Time in the 19
th

Century.
The problem of gendered time is rarely addressed in critical discourse. In this paper I
will argue that the differences in the representations between female/male time act
as the pivotal point in the formation of our understanding of gender. The natural
(biological) and cultural assumptions are entangled here and gendered temporality
becomes an extremely powerful element in the construction of gender.
The canonic article on time and gender remains J ulia Kristevas Womens Time.
Kristeva argues that there is, on the one hand, a certain connection between female
subjectivity and cyclical, recurrent, cosmic experience of time, which is based on
biological processes. On the other hand, masculine identity is anchored in linear and
historical time. I will attempt to put this basic categorization in its historical
perspective and suggest that the seemingly positive assessment of womans time in
the post-modern discourse due to its concurrence with the course of nature through
cycles, is deceptive and differs from its conception in Victorian epistemology, where
nature was de-essentialised and perceived as an eternally mutating entity.
I will focus on 19
th

century Britain as the place and time where the obsession with
both time and gender reached the extreme, though the crucial interrelation between
these two concepts went paradoxically unnoticed. Darwinian and, much later,
Freudian theories will form two opposite poles of biological and cultural gendering of
time. Was woman ruled out of the evolutionary, teleological development and
trapped into the eternal devolutional stasis? To what extent did this cause the birth
of the figure of the archetypal female hysteric with her inability to come to terms with
her traumatic past a past which kept erupting into the present? Is woman allowed
to have a past at all?
As I intend to show, the gendered time perspective is inextricably connected with
the issue of female sexuality. I will draw on the literary examples of the so called
fallen women in the Victorian novels to demonstrate the patriarchal view of what
womans past should (not) be. The inscription of past into womans body becomes a
powerful symbol of reducing womans being to her physique.


Isabelle Dussauge
Linkping University
Sweden


Neuro-gaydars and Fe/male Brains: Brain Imaging Studies of Homosexuality in
the 2000s

Brain scans of homosexuality and images of male and female brain function are
becoming a common element of popular scientific news. The new neuro-studies of
human sexuality seem haunted, among others, by figures of the sexual invert and by
cultural stereotypes of men and women's behavior. Does recent neurobiological
research on sexuality equate with biological-deterministic views of the brain, gender
and sexuality? How is gender re-described and re-produced when human
homosexuality is studied in brain scanners?

Drawing on a new project conducted together with Dr Anelis Kaiser, this paper
examines the cultural production of gender in the growing field of new neuroscientific
research on homosexuality that makes use of neuroimaging techniques, i.e.
measuring and visualization of correlates of brain activity in humans. Assumptions
about gender, sexuality and the brain are built in at all levels of the experiments
integral to neuroimaging practice: from the selection of research participants, design
of the experimental tasks conducted by those, to the statistical analysis of the results
(cf. Dumit 2004).

In this paper I will analyze the questions raised in the field of neuroimaging of
homosexuality, and the notions of gender and sexuality used in the fields knowledge
production, with focus on experiments and their interpretation.

I will suggest the notion of neuroframing in order to make sense of the process by
which a phenomenon - here, homosexuality - becomes the object of neurosciences
and is transformed by that becoming (in echo to notions of biomedicalizations such
as in Clarke et al. 2003). Like the geneticization of behavior, the neuroframing of
sexual behavior operates at a socio-cultural level, in the production of scientific and
popular-scientific facts.



J ana Dvorackova
Masaryk University
Czech Republic


Medical Re-shaping of Gender and Sexuality through Explanations of
Transsexuality

In spite of a general tendency to perceive homosexuality and transsexuality as two
entirely distinct phenomena, there has been a long history within medical and
popular discourses of linking homosexuality with a certain form of gender inversion.
However, the assumed association of male homosexuality with femininity and
lesbianism with masculinity has gradually receded from the medical view. At the
beginning of the twentieth century sexologists Magnus Hirschfeld and Havelock Ellis
argued against the supposed correlation of same-sex desire and cross-gender
identification. A category today known as transsexuality was born.

Since then, medicine has taken a dominant role in conceptualization of the new
phenomenon of transsexuality. It has significantly affected how
transsexuality/transgender is viewed and experienced in contemporary Western
societies. Yet, diverse forms through which medicine conceptualizes the etiology of a
cross-gender identification reconfigurate the cultural notions of gender and
homo/sexuality as well.

Based on the analysis of medical texts, this paper discusses essential turning points
in the development of conceptualization of the etiology of transsexuality. It explores
gender assumptions that constitute the particular conceptions of etiology of
transsexuality, as well as potential consequences of these conceptions for cultural
understanding of gender. Another aim of the paper is to uncover the complex
relations between medical constructions of transsexuality and homosexuality. Firstly,
the effect of biological theories of homosexuality on the formation of the etiology of
transsexuality will be outlined. Secondly, the paper will focus on specific forms of
sustaining the symbolic boundary between homosexuality and transsexuality in
etiological theories and standardized practices of transsexuality diagnostics.




Waltraud Ernst
University of Hildesheim
Germany


Narrations of the Erotic in Evolutionary Biology

Natural sciences are narrations about nature and knowledge, but also about the
nature and meaning of social relations. Evolutionary biology as the science of life
development, most prominently, tells about the function of human intimate relations,
as one of the most fascinating but never fully understandable sites of life, the one
which escapes logical structuring and causal explanation, the domain of poems and
novels. Insofar as human intimate relations are based on erotic attraction and
interaction they have always been both a matter of high delight and devastating
trauma as well as a matter of economic value and political control. In this context,
evolutionary biology has taken a crucial and critical position in explaining processes
of and between bodies within changing but powerful economic and political regimes.

In my research project on the erotic economies of science I am studying the
historical narrations of science on the erotic between 1750 and 1850. The study
explores the shifts in the narrations of science on the erotic during this period. The
significance of the erotic in connection with the development of categories of gender
and race in these narrations of the emerging European natural sciences in the era of
colonialism and gender segregation is in particular focus. The goal is to better
understand contemporary accounts of life sciences on erotic desires and pleasures,
practises and relations.

In my paper I want to find out how in Charles Darwin's most prominent texts different
contemporary narrations were interwoven in an reinterpretation of the erotic as a site
of natural laws of desire. I will look for interdependencies to other stories and
contemporary cultural beliefs and relate them to Anne Fausto-Sterlings account on
the construction of human sexuality in "Sexing the body" (2000).

Paola Ferruta
Berlin-Potsdam University
Germany


The Socio-political Implications of the Research into the Hermaphroditic Body
by 19
th

-Century Teratologists
The hermaphrodite offers a prime example of how the human body became a
scientific object and a dispositif at the same time. Here is question of the concept of
dispositif (apparatus) in the foucauldian sense and even more in that postulated by
Giorgio Agamben. Throughout the nineteenth century hermaphrodites became
scientific objects in a wide ranging natural scientific debate, a debate which provided
a space where the monster, i.e. the hermaphrodite, had multiple diagnoses and
causes. Its medical definition was a changing and fluid one. 19
th

-century research on
hermaphrodites and its resonance in the socio-political arena signify the mutual
intertwining of nature, culture and gender as well as a specific theorisation,
representation and experience of their entanglement.
Experimental embryology and comparative anatomy became fundamental to
investigating the cause of monstrosity. The great teratological work Histoire gnrale
et particulire des anomalies de lorganisation chez lhome et les animaux, by
French zoologist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1805-1861) was released in 1832-
1837. A part of the Teratologie was consecrated to hermaphroditism
(hermaphrodismes), which was regarded as part of a natural process, rather than as
an independently produced phenomenon.

In the course of the nineteenth century the epistemological dimension opened up by
investigating the hermaphroditic body as a scientific object entangled it in webs of
socio-political implications, primarily in the utopian socialists political propaganda, in
literary and artistic movements as well as esoteric circles. Drawings, pictures,
unpublished epistolary exchanges and also the material culture, i.e. natural
scientific and cultural artefacts, are sources available for this investigation. This can
produce new insights on nineteenth-century scientific texts as well as provide fruitful
debate on how cultural representations of gender and nature have changed the ways
in which scientific projects have been formulated and popularised.
Malin Grahn
University of Helsinki
Finland


Sexual Difference in Ancient Embryology: Aristotle and Galen

In my paper I shall discuss notions of sexual difference in Ancient embryology, and
the relevance of these notions for a philosophical understanding of human being and
her capacities. I shall compare the embryological theories of Aristotle and Galen, and
see how they present, first, the male and female roles in reproduction and, second,
the development of the sex of the embryo.

The focal point of my paper is the connection between sexual difference and such
central metaphysical concepts as form and matter, or activity and passivity. Aristotle
argues that the man provides the embryo with form and the mother with matter.
Hence his views on embryology are connected to his metaphysics, and consequently
he, as I shall argue, presents the difference between man and woman as a
metaphysical one.

The philosophical concepts of activity and passivity, as well as form and matter are
crucial also in Galens embryology. Galen compares sperm to an artist and womans
menstrual blood to the wax that the artist shapes. However, he also presents an
argument that there exists a specific female sperm. Thus, there are both some
interesting similarities and differences in the roles assigned to man and woman in
Aristotles and Galens embryological models.

After having scrutinized the metaphysical commitments of Aristotles and Galens
embryology, I shall conclude my presentation by showing that even though both of
these thinkers present sexual difference as a fundamental one, neither of them was
a biological reductivist. In other words, they do not attempt to explain differences in
e.g. characters or social roles of men and women on the basis of differences in
reproductive roles. Thus, Ancient natural philosophy does not support reductionism
in explaining gender a tendency that is increasingly common in todays popular
scientific discussions.
Natascha Gruber
University of Vienna / UC Berkeley
Austria / USA


New Paradigms in Gender Theory?

Within gender theory the nature/nurture controversy has been an ongoing discussion
for the last decades. But recently, many scholars argue that this distinction has come
to its theoretical limits and suggest developing new approaches in order to analyze
the interplay between culture and biology, in order to (re-)conceptualize the body, as
well as the categories of sex and gender, as an intersection and interaction, between
both culture as well as biology.

In her talk Nature, Nurture, Neither: Reconceptualizing sex, gender and sexuality, a
key note talk I organized at UC Berkeley for the Gender and Womens Studies
Spring Colloquia, in March 2009, Anne Fausto-Sterling, renowned biologist and
gender theorist, presented some of her latest work, in which she develops a new
theoretical framework for conceptualizing sex and gender, the body, and sexuality.
Her approach is an effort to apply Developmental/Dynamic Systems Theory (in short
DST) to gender theory. Fausto-Sterling argues, that DST offers an alternative
theoretical framework to the nature/nurture controversy, as it tries to synthesize both.
Instead of putting or favouring nature against nurture (essentialist view) or nurture
against nature (de-/constructionist view), the DST approach aims for an
understanding of how bodily (sex) as well as social (gender) configurations emerge
from a web of mutual interactions and inter-dependencies between biological and
cultural settings, and tries to explain how these settings and contexts materialize into
the body. In DST biological, genetic and evolutionary parameters are recognized as
important factors, but these factors are viewed in a non-deterministic, non-
essentialist way, which is most important when reflecting on the categories of sex
and gender. With her work, Fausto-Sterling fuses Natural Sciences with Social
Sciences and Humanities. It is from this position that makes Fausto-Sterlings
contribution innovative and influential for todays discourses in the bio-sciences as
well as in gender and feminist theory.

Another theorist, elaborating a developmental/dynamic approach to gender is
Adrienne Harris, notably in her book Gender as Soft Assembly (Routledge, 2005),
where she raises and answers the question what it means to inhabit and perform
gendered identities. Harris comes from a psychological and psychoanalytical point of
view, and she argues that children become gendered in multiple, configured
contexts. In her book she offers new developmental models, incorporating relational
psychoanalysis, and processes of mentalization and symbolization, to describe the
fluid, constructed processes of becoming a gendered being.

In my presentation I will discuss these new approaches in gender theory, evolving
from interdisciplinary research and from an interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange
between Live Sciences and Humanities. I will argue that these new developments
are most promising, as they rise the question for a new paradigm, or at least a
paradigm shift for the discipline of gender studies as such, as they offer new ways of
re-thinking and re-conceptualizing the categories of sex and gender, as well as of
race, as neither mere natural nor as mere cultural entities, but in a synergetic,
evolutionary, procedural dialectics between both.
Nilsen Gken
Dokuz Eylul University
Turkey


The Unholy Trinity in the Garden: Women, Nature and Culture in Hawthornes
Rappaccinis Daughter

The Bible as one of the earliest documents of the Western culture assigns to the
women the role of seduction and destruction, for Eve is responsible for the Fall of
mankind from the perfect state of peace, harmony, and happiness to a lifetime of
strife and toil on Earth. For this reason, the Genesis story establishes Adams
sovereignty over Eve. In addition, for reasons not quite as clearly identified as in the
case of Eve, God gives Adam dominion over animals, hence Nature, in the same
book of the Bible. Therefore, as eco-feminists often point out, in the patriarchal
cultural norms, the exploitation and oppression of women and Nature go hand in
hand.

Often considered to be Hawthornes rewriting of the Genesis story of the Fall,
Rappaccinis Daughter provides a close examination of the interconnectedness
between the domination of women and Nature by the patriarchal cultural norms. The
major female character Beatrice is an early prototype of genetically modified life-
form, for her own father has transformed her into a young woman with poisonous
breath who is thus cut off from all human contact and confined in a luxuriantly fertile
but far-from-natural garden of beautiful but poisonous plants and flowers much like
herself. The image of the garden as domesticated Nature provides close parallels to
the patriarchal image of the virgin Eve; their earliest unruliness taken under strict
control, they are both safe and tailored to serve the desires of the male
owners/lovers. The ultimate end of the mission of patriarchy is to transfigure the
garden to the city and virgin Eve to mother Eve. However, once patriarchal culture
begins to exploit and transform Nature and womenespecially under the auspices
of scienceits progress will not cease until the ultimate annihilation of both. For
example, the three male figures around BeatriceGiovanni, her lover; Rappaccini,
her father, and Baglioni, Giovannis surrogate fathercollaborate to lead Beatrice to
her death. Hawthorne creates in these three characters a mocking resemblance of
the holy trinity in such a way that the life-giving force of the biblical trinity is replaced
by a set of death-inspiring conspirators. As such, Rappaccinis Daughter can be
considered an early cry for the need to instate a culture whose myths will celebrate
the dissolution of the dichotomies between culture-Nature, male-female, and
eventually human-nonhuman, an endeavor that eco-feminists have presently taken
up.


J udith Haas
Rhodes College
USA


The State of Nature and the Death of Man in Marlen Haushofers The Wall

Enlightenment political theory provides as powerful an exhibit as any of the durability of
the opposition between nature and culture. The derivation of a rational theory of
political society from an autonomous and alien state of nature requires a suspension of
disbelief that western culture has never managed to fully disengage from. As Donna
Haraway has argued in her famous Manifesto for Cyborgs (1985), this opposition fuels
a salvation history that demands apocalypse as its telos. Tales of apocalypse are not
an innovation of nuclear age, and as much as the genre of apocalyptic narrative has
come to be about the destructive capacity of humans particular to the late 20
th

century,
it also represents the evolving adaptation of a specific Enlightenment narrative: the
story of how (and why) humans abandoned the state of nature and entered political
society.
Marlen Haushofers 1962 novel, The Wall (Die Wand), lauded by critics as a feminist
Robinsonade, provides an illuminating vantage point for examining the extraordinary
persistence of the opposition between nature and culture. Haushofers work depicts a
markedly different vision of apocalypse compared to such popular novels such as
Cormac McCarthys 2006 The Wall in which a father and son traverse a dying
wasteland filled with violent and cannibalistic male predators. The unnamed narrator of
The Wall, possibly the last living human, finds herself in a world of extant, if somewhat
precarious fertility that requires her careful management. Resolutely rejecting the
fantasy of the autonomous subject that animates Enlightenment political theory,
Haushofers novel explores the gendered nature of this particularly western origin story
and draws suggestive links between narratives of origins and narratives of apocalypse.






Cynthia Hammond
Concordia University
Canada


The Suffragettes Wood: Landscape, Gender and Activism in Edwardian England

For fifty years, the British womens suffrage activist, Helen Watts (1881-1965) carried a
faded sprig from the little juniper tree she planted in 1911 on the grounds of Eagle
House, a villa on the outskirts of Bath, England. Watts was one of over sixty suffragettes
who visited Eagle House to recover from the violence of prison. In the bucolic Somerset
hills, they planted commemorative trees and shrubs as a lasting memorial to [their]
faith in the political future of women.

Eagle House was home to the Blathwayt family, all supporters of womens franchise.
Emily Blathwayt tended daily to the arboretum while her husband, Colonel Linley took
meticulous photographs of almost every tree and suffragette; their daughter Mary was a
key local figure in the cause. The Colonels photographs show the suffragettes with
fresh blossoms pinned to their blouses, gently watering or touching the trees. The
images thus participate in the familiar association of women with nature, but they also
can be read against the grain, as part of the suffragettes strategic deployment of such
associations to further their cause. In this paper, I argue that the Suffragettes Wood
was also an expression of the dovetailing of convention and resistance in the political
work of the suffrage movement; while individual women were equated with specific
trees, the collaborative spatial production of the orchard is one of its most distinctive
qualities. The existing scholarship on the spaces of suffrage activism (Walker,
Cresswell, Dobbie) points to the arboretums uniqueness, in that it was a distinctly rural
as opposed to urban creation.

In 1965, just prior to the rise of second-wave feminism in England, bulldozers destroyed
the trees to make way for a housing estate only one tree remains. Using local
residents memories, regional newspaper accounts, WWII aerial photographs, and the
results of a community art project I undertook in 2009, I argue that the Suffragettes
Wood was a rare example of feminist landscape design, whose embrace of the
supposed kinship between women and nature may have struggled to find an audience
in 1960s England. This conference is an ideal setting in which to explore the
arboretums mingling of gender and nature anew.
J oan Haran
Cardiff University
United Kingdom


All Over Creation: Re-Imagining NatureCultures?

In All Over Creation, Ruth Ozeki weaves a dense narrative around fractured families,
genetically modified monoculture and public engagement by big agribusiness and
political activists. Drawing on the resources of feminist cultural studies of
technoscience, this paper will explore the ways in which Ozekis narrative deploys
concepts such as (in)fertility, reproduction, monoculture and hybridity to represent
and critique contemporary technoscientific US culture, particularly in relation to the
application of genomic technologies to agriculture. It will also open up the novels
treatment of issues of gender and sexuality to investigate the extent to which there is
an explicit attempt to deconstruct or subvert discourses of gender.

The novel opens: It starts with the earth. How can it not? and concludes with the
ironic declamation: Daddys going to save the world. Thus one key question that I
will ask is whether the complex connections among gender, nature and culture are
produced in the novel through the conventional categories of liberal humanism or
whether a more entangled account emerges. A second key question I will pose is
how successful the textual strategy of offering a range of reader positions to take up
in relation to issues such as genetic modification of crops, non-violent direct action
and familial responsibility is for deferring any fixed readings of the novels message,
despite its rich pedagogical possibilities.

Finally, the paper will compare Ozekis story of the development of potato farming in
Idaho with the genealogies of companion species that Haraway constructs in When
Species Meet in order to illuminate where and how the two authors projects
converge and diverge in their use of generative metaphors and critical attention to
the discursive practices of a range of mutually implicated actors.
Lou-Salom Heer / Sandra Nicolodi / Bettina Stehli
University of Zurich
Switzerland


Gendered Apes, Monkey Business and other Tales of Primate Nature

Biologistic explanations for human behaviour boomed considerably in popular media
since the 1990s. Popular scientific articles which treat questions of the nature of
gender especially make big headlines. The tendency of these articles goes like this:
Differences between men and women are constituted by their 'nature' (namely by the
holy triad: brain, gene, hormone). This nature, which was established in an imagined
Stone Age, signifies both the 'original state' of humans and their 'essence'. However
claims are made not only about human nature, but also about animals. Deeply
gendered stories are told especially through co-primates. The Chimpanzee for
example stands for male society, politics, war and competition; the Bonobo on the
other hand represents female society, the principle of "make love not war" and
cooperation.

Biologistic explanations of so-called female and male behavior are often associated
with conservative and anti-feminist politics. Yet an analysis of such popular accounts
shows that this perception is too simple. The German-speaking news magazine Der
Spiegel for example bolsters the demand for equal opportunities for women on the
labor market with sociobiologist narratives. At the same time stories are published
about troubled schoolboys, men's bad health behaviour and the decline of the Y
chromosome. Men have become something of an endangered species due to their
alleged competitive nature. Moreover men's behaviour is depicted as a threat to
society: Risky behaviour is no longer required since it implies an increase in costs.
It's women's supposed cooperative nature that is in high demand.

Economic and evolutionary biological discourses are intertwined in multiple ways.
Not only has the news value of biology in German-language mass media risen
remarkably. It seems that the nature of nature itself is at stake. Biology has become a
powerful re-source to negotiate an economic nature, the nature of economy and a
(gendered) politics of the future. A feminist involvement with this phenomenon has
become inevitable.
Brooke Holmes
Princeton University

USA

Rethinking Sex and Gender at the Crossroads of Physis and Nomos

Gender, according to what has become something of a communis opinio, is an
ancient notion, far older than the notion of sex. It is a notion, we are told in a recent
general introduction to the notion of gender, that, for pre-moderns such as the ancient
Greeks, had cosmological application that transcended individual bodies and natures;
indeed, to the extent the ancient Greeks did not even have a concept of the bodyan
influential claim most associated with the German Hellenist Bruno Snellthey cannot
really be said to have a concept of sex as something other than gender and, by
extension, a concept of nature as separate from culture.
1


At the same time, the very Western philosophical and scientific tradition that
makes possible the idea of nature as somehow neutral or outside cultureoutside of
social and ethical values, that ishas its origins in the Greeks. More specifically, I
suggest, it is the development of a concept of the physical body in Greek science that
creates what is sometimes seen as a distinctly modern tension between an investment
in nature as the source of necessary truths and culture as the domain of malleable
identities, particularly gendered identities.

The pre-moderns, then, are not simply the foil of the moderns. Rather, they offer
a more intriguing and complicated picture. In this paper, I thus sketch in broad strokes a
new reading of how a discourse of nature and the body develops in the ancient Greek
world. I also suggest some ways in which this more complicated picture of the classical
past can help us move beyond the recent opposition between gender (constructed) and
sex (natural) to a model for thinking the intertwining of the biological and the cultural in
the twenty-first century.





1
C. Colebrook, Gender (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), p. 2.

Christina Hughes
University of Warwick
United Kingdom


Salivation: Exploring Intra-actions of Pleasures Affects

Its like being in the sweety shop. Its like being an addict. When I see one [a
precious stone] I like, I get . [She points to her mouth. Her tongue looks as if
it is touching the roof of her mouth and then it flickers, in lizard fashion,
momentarily across her lips.] My mouth goes wet. I know then I am going to
buy it. (Rachel, J ewellery Designer Maker comments, Field Notes, April
2008)

Recent work in the field of affect is posing a number of challenges that are
concerned with beginning to grapple, in Barads (2007) terms, with the intra-action of
mind/body, nature/nurture materialities. This paper provides an exploration of what
intra-action might mean in terms of developing accounts of pleasures affects in the
artistic and creative careers of designer makers. Following Barad (2007: 128) the
paper asks How might we understand not only how human bodily contours are
constituted through psychic processes but how even the very atoms that make up
the biological body come to matter and, more generally, how matter makes itself
felt? Here, the paper is concerned with both the physiological and the symbolic
accorded to the anticipatory pleasure reflex of salivation and how it both points up,
and points towards particular kinds of objects of promise central to artistic creativity.
The paper also considers Gortons (2007: 337) model of affective contagion to think
through the transmission of affect by asking How, for example, do we pick up on
emotions and feelings in social space without a word needing to be said? The
issues here draw attention to the pedagogical implications of the sociality of pleasure
and the body in social space.

References

Barad, K (2007) Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of how
Matter comes to Matter, in S Alaimo and S Hekman (Eds) Material Feminisms,
Bloomington, Indiana University Press

Gorton, K (2007) Theorizing emotion and affect: Feminist engagements, Feminist
Theory, 8(3): 333-348


Adda Inglfsdttir
Utrecht University
Iceland / Netherlands


Our brains are a bit more sensitive: The Bio-Psycho-Social Relationship
in Psychiatrists Discourse of Gender and Depression

Recently in feminist theory, there has been a re-shuffling in the definitions of nature
and culture, demonstrated by the theoretical stream of new materialism. As a
feminist theoretical approach, new materialism seeks to capture the interaction of the
material and the discursive, and thus to abandon the dichotomy inherent in social-
constructionist feminism, exemplified by the sex/gender dichotomy.

Psychiatry explicitly deals with the relationship between nature and culture within the
individual. However, there is marked unease in the formulation of this relationship,
demonstrated by the conflicting views on what is held to be one of the best proven
facts of psychiatry: women are more often depressed than men. While depression is
increasingly explained in terms of biochemical imbalance, the overwhelming majority
of women diagnosed with depression screams for the integration of socio-cultural
explanations. Psychiatry generally acknowledges a bio-psycho-social explanation
but the research focus is on hormones, genes and neurotransmitters, and the main
treatment is drugs. Meanwhile, feminist arguments have often explicitly bypassed the
biological domain and pointed to patriarchy and the medical-pharmaceutical
establishment as causes.

Rather than evaluating the validity of these often dichotomous explanations, I
suggest looking at the explanatory framework underneath the psychiatric discourse
of gender and depression, in order to reveal its underlying assumptions about the
bio-psycho-social relationship and its conceptions of sex and gender.

Through the analysis of six semi-structured, deep interviews with psychiatrists at the
national hospital in Iceland, I will analyze the various attempts made at explaining
womens more frequent depression, which include ideas from biomedicine,
evolutionary biology, cognitive behavioral psychology and social constructionism.
Furthermore, I will show how the possibilities for cultivating a biocultural
understanding of depression, present in the psychiatrists discourse, are restricted by
a positivist scientific framework and an underlying body/mind dichotomy.

In conclusion I will outline an alternagtive way of framing the problem of women and
depression. Using the concept of morphologies of sexual difference and the
biocultural body, I will suggest how to deal with womens sensitive brains without
dismissing the biological in depression.

Marjaana J auhola
United Kingdom


Islamisation of the Natural Sex Difference? The Concept Pair Sex/Gender
and Kodrat in the Gender Policy Documents in Aceh, Indonesia

the only difference that men and women have is kodrat (Banner on the
International Womens Day in Banda Aceh 2007)

This paper focuses on the ways in which the gender equality discourse in the current
Acehnese and wider Indonesian context draws from not only from naturalized
division between the natural sex and constructed gender, but further draws from
another concept kodrat that translates into Gods creation or destiny. According to
this understanding, the sex difference and the naturalized understanding between
sex-gender (male is masculine; female is feminine) is naturalized with readings from
the Quran.

The first part of the paper illustrates how the policy discourse on gender equality in
the context of formalisation of Sharia law has made the discursive shift into using
theological argumentation of the nature. With the effect, that those who possess the
authority to provide Islamic interpretations of what constitutes nurture and nature,
have gained new space in formulating normative boundaries for what gender
politics can consist of.

The second part of the paper focuses on the consequences of this normative shift to
bodies whose gender does not correspond to this construct. The narratives of
violence subvert the unintelligible (Butler 2004) and the miscounted (Chambers
2009) provide forms of subversive politics that plea to see differently waria
1

1
Waria is a word used in Indonesia for male to female transgendered person. It originates from the
words wanita=woman, pria=man.
are
humans too. The analysis draws from my PhD research on the normative
boundaries of gender advocacy in the post-tsunami context in Aceh, Indonesia.
Hanna J ohansson
University of Helsinki
Finland


Making Embodied, Objective and Accountable Spaces in Video Installations

In her article Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in feminism and the
privilege of partial perspective (1988) Donna Haraway argues for situational and
particular knowledge against the idea of absolute knowing and relativism. She insists
that the notion of situational knowledge offers an alternative to the domination of the
western masculine, violent and capitalistic concept of knowledge.

In the core part of the article, she analyses this metaphor of vision and develops the
ways to move it away from the trick of omnipotency. In the first place one must
understand that all vision is embodied. Haraway wants to make room for the feminist
objective knowledge that is based on the split and contradictory subject, which seeks
position instead of being and loves the sciences and politics of interpretation, and
the partly understood. Haraway reminds us that there is no strict division between
prosthetic i.e. technological eyes and our own organic ones, both are active
perceptual systems, building on translations and specific ways of seeing, that is,
ways of life.

I develop Haraways partial vision as the objective visual knowledge by applying her
theoretical insight to the video installations made by the Finnish artist Marjatta Oja.
Her works consist of overlapping images created with different kind of projectors,
projections, screens, transparent canvases, light, tripods, paintings, actual
conversations etc.

I elaborate on the encounter of two works with Haraways text. I argue for an
interpretation where the knowledge of the work is to be found in the process, which
the encounter between the viewer and the work generates. That process is temporal
but also material since I understand these technical apparatuses and the images as
having material values and agential abilities. The knowledge the installation brings
forth is partial, embodied, objective and accountable.


Ute Kalender
Humboldt-University Berlin
Germany


Beyond Androcentric Gene-determinism? Re-articulations of Gender and
Environment in Epigenetics

Epigenetic approaches more and more enter various fields of biomedicine and
biomedical research. Epigeneticists deal with cell processes beyond the genes and
assume that a metacode the epigenome exists which determines the regulation of
genes. This epigenome shall not just be influenced by a specific diet or medical
treatment, the epigenetic metacodes shall also be hereditary. So on first sight
epigenetics does not just consider environmental influences, it also seems to be the
opposite to gene determinism and to offer a more complex version of the organism.

For some time feminist theorists therefore have been interested in epigenetics: Because
epigenetics focuses on the cytoplasma, which was associated with the egg, the female
organism and hence with the female contribution to reproduction, feminists have
interpreted epigenetics as an alternative approach to genetics and its implicit
androcentrism. And indeed, current epigenetic approaches seem to revalue the female
organism, as key concepts in epigenetics are maternal cell effects and female
reproductive behaviour.

However, on second sight this epigenetic interest in sex specific cellular processes
turns out to be problematic: Because epigenetics assumes that the environment
namely behavior and lifestyle coins genes, gender specific imperatives of genetic
responsibility are intensified. The central claim of my paper thus is that in current
epigenetic research this gender awareness has been diverted into an even more
sophisticated version of epigenomic susceptibilty: Epigenetics creates a holistic version
of epigenetic risks and responsibilities.

My paper would critically analyze implicit notions of gender in epigenetic re-articulations
of the term environment. I would present insights from my empirical post-doc-project
on epigenetics from a gender perspective. Qualitative interviews with epigeneticists in
Great Britain and Germany form the basis of this inquiry. Further extant data are
scientific journal articles, book chapters in edited volumes, websites of expert networks,
position statements popular, and press reportings.
Anu Koivunen
Stockholm University
Sweden


Allergic to Affectivity? Reimaging Life in Safe (Todd Haynes 1995)

Cinematic imaginations of transgressing the nature/culture divide abound, with
J ames Camerons 3D-spectacle Avatar (2009) as the most recent example.
Whereas the indigenous Navi people in Camerons film draw their spiritual strength
by literally plugging into the nature, Todd Hayness Safe (1995) tells a counter-
narrative. In a story set in 1987 Southern California, Carol White (J ulianne Moore)
develops Environmental Illness, a diagnosis she is given after she becomes
increasingly allergic to being out in the world. As a solution, she becomes a recluse,
escaping life into a safe house.

While previously examined as a representation of hysteria or as a metaphor for AIDS
panic, this paper discusses Safe as being crucially a dramatization of the
nature/culture boundary with female body as the prime site and allergy as the key
metaphor. Foregrounding questions of vulnerability and susceptibility, the film reads
as a study on affectivity as the constitutive dimension of a subjects being in the
world, of being as an embodied and enfleshed. In this paper, hence, Safe is
discussed in terms of phenomenological and new materialist theories of affectivity.
Furthermore, it is argued, through the figure of the housewife the film taps into
feminist histories and contemporary discussions on the female subjectivity and
embodiment, posing complex questions about nature and culture, life and death,
safety and danger.







Cynthia Kraus
University of Lausanne
Switzerland


Tensions in Discourses about Nature-Culture Productions of the Self:
Brain Plasticity and Other Biosocial Arguments

This paper discusses epistemological and political questions about the status of nature-
culture, i.e. biosocial, arguments in, and in relation to, neurobiological and feminist
discourses. As we are well aware, such arguments that conceive of many intricate,
productive and feedback processes between the self, the brain, the body and society,
and underscore individual variations rather than group differences, has been deployed
for all biological levels by feminist critics against deterministic and reductionist
versions of human nature.

Now, with the hype of neuroscience, we are more than ever, I suggest, in need of
critically analyzing rather than assuming and advancing for strategic/critical reasons
nature-culture arguments about brain plasticity, individual variations, idiosyncrasy and
the like for at least two reasons. First, while brain studies are committed to the existence
of two sexes, and often to capitalizing on this basic difference, they are also and
fundamentally about biosocial diversity and idiosyncrasy. At issue then is less biological
determinism per se (e.g. invariance/fixity or a hard wire theory) than tensions within
cerebral arguments that are used either to undermine or stress the idea of a
sexed/gendered/sexualized brain, body, self. Second, such two-way, not to say double-
edged, arguments prove to be particularly attractive. Interestingly, they are equally
promoted by enthusiasts and critics of brain sex research, be they biologists, feminist
scholars, normal people, patients, or pro-gender and sexual diversity activists.

I would like to ground my discussion in a historical analysis of the ways in which
intersex and trans activists have sought to challenge the clinical management and
definitions of their disorders by mobilizing plastic and idiosyncratic knowledge claims
from studies about an intersexed and transsexual brains. This case study will serve to
show one possible way to go to develop a feminist critical perspective that analyzes
rather than trades one nature-culture argument for another.

Leena Kurvet-Kosaar
Tallinn University
Estonia


"Exaltation of Blood Cells": Gendering Race and Heredity in the Work of Aino
Kallas

Issues of race and heredity occupy an important position among areas of active
polemics and inquiry in late 19
th
and early 20
th

century Europe. The fictional,
essayistic and autobiographical writings of Aino Kallas (1878-1956), a diverse and
astute cultural critic of her times, display in-depth familiarity with the work of several
leading European race theorists, such as, for example, Cesare Lombroso, Gustav
Morel, Hippolyte Taine, Arthur Gobineau and others. In her work, important racial
foci include, e.g., the role of heredity in relation to the possibilities and limits of the
Estonian race and the restless and mixed blood heritage of her own family. However,
regardless of the more specific thematic foci, these issues are almost always
oftentimes entangled with those of gender. There are two important questions in
particular, that occupy the thoughts of Aino Kallas for prolonged periods of time
where gender emerges as a central lense through which race is viewed. What are
the implications of her familys intricate blood heritage for her as a woman? What
are, according to the laws of heredity, the possibilities for the existence of a woman
of genius? In my presentation, I wish to discuss both questions as well as their
interrelatedness, relying on Kallas engagement with race theories in her
autobiographical and biographical writings.


Marissa Landrigan
Iowa State University
USA


Word as Weapon: Dismantling Hierarchy Through Boundary-Crossing in Terry
Tempest Williams Refuge and Arundhati Roys The Cost of Living

Contemporary writers across the globe combine environmental and social activism with
literature, employing creative literary devices to reach a wider political audience. The
willingness of such authors to blur the lines between nonfiction reporting and creative
literature indicates a holistic approach to solving the worlds social and environmental
ills that modern political movements also employ. My paper addresses how two authors
in particular, Terry Tempest Williams and Arundhati Roy, navigate this holistic approach
by giving voice to minority groups, in order to provide a voice for the natural
environment. In doing so, these two writers demonstrate the similar techniques and
approaches of ecofeminist and postcolonial literary activists, despite their different
geographic locations and personal backgrounds. In both works of literature, the authors
share a common goal: to bring together the fates of a people and their ecological
community in a way that challenges their domination by questioning the traditional
structure of power. To this end, Williams and Roy employ similar literary techniques,
namely: aligning the identity of a specific group of people to a specific place and linking
the physical human body (often female) with the natural landscape, in order to place
their texts in a larger political context by refusing to adhere to preconceived boundaries
on which the exploitation of resources is based.

While Arundhati Roy and Terry Tempest Williams recognize and address the
heightened impacts environmental degradation have on minority groups of people, they
both acknowledge that the negative impacts of human exploitation of natural resources
will eventually reach even those in power. Therefore, a solution to environmental
degradation must necessarily be both global and inclusive. In order to reconstruct a
holistic worldview, activists must first deconstruct those dualisms, and the people in a
position to challenge those boundaries are those who have been oppressed by them.
Both Roy and Williams, along with other literary social and environmental activists, want
their voices, representative of traditionally oppressed groups, to be a part of the
conversation on solving these environmental crises, a solution they believe lies in the
construction of a new political and social reality.
Kirsten Leng
University of Michigan
Germany/USA


A Dark and Elusive Phenomenon: Feminist Sex Reformers Debate the Female Sex
Drive, 1880-1914

Taking the fascinating scientization of the social in modernizing Europe as its context,
this paper examines the scientization of feminist debates regarding the character of the
female sex drive in Germany and Great Britain between the years 1880-1914. During
these volatile years of rapid European modernization, sexual science increasingly
informed the content and character of crucial public debates concerning gender and
sexuality. Much of the new sexual science, a super-discipline comprised of fields such
as physiology, psychology, natural history, anthropology, and gynaecology, was
markedly hostile to womens rights, tending to reduce women to their bodies and thus
assert that their existing social roles were biologically predestined. Nevertheless,
many feminist sex reformers found creative ways of appropriating such knowledge to
argue on behalf of wide-ranging reforms of sexual relations and institutions.

Importantly, however, feminists engagement with sexual science also contributed to the
reconfiguration, that is, the normalization, of the feminist subject, making the woman
on whose behalf feminists advocated less universal and more aspirational. This paper
will explore how such debates on the female sex drive helped construct the modern
subject of feminist sexual politics as one defined by her health and naturalness, as
well as how scientized analyses of the female sex drive, through their mediation and
revelation of the natural, underpinned feminist reform demands regarding sexual
education (Aufklrung), birth control, male sexuality, marriage, prostitution, and
venereal diseases, alongside long-standing feminist claims, such as womens right to
economic independence. This paper also illuminates the transnational character of this
debate by tracing the circulation of key texts and individuals between two of the most
important sites for the production of sexual science in Europe during the years 1880 to
1914, Germany and Britain. In so doing, it argues that such an understanding can
illuminate the processes through which the modern, liberal understandings of sex and
gender were forged.

Lisa Malich
Humboldt-University Berlin
Germany


Naturing Pregnancy: Representations of Hormonal Mood Swings in Pregnancy
Guidebooks

Pregnancy is often praised as the most natural and most female state there is. Never-
theless, pregnant women are often portrayed as being ruled by raging hormones; they
are hysterically crying, raging in uncontrollable anger, and displaying irrational beha-
vior phenomena that can be labeled as pregnant mood swings. Ascribed to female
nature, these mood swings seem to disrupt cultural conventions.

This talk will offer an analysis of the main social constructions of mood swings through
a discourse analysis of German pregnancy guidebooks. Initially, I will delineate the dif-
ferent concepts of knowledge that establish expertise regarding emotions during preg-
nancy: the scientific knowledge of the doctor, the natural knowledge of the midwife
and the experiential knowledge of the laywomen. Thereafter, I will concentrate on
three characteristic dimensions found in representations of mood swings. First it will
be analyzed how the described moods and behaviors function as the opposite side of
cultural norms, particularly the socially desirable roles of the good mother and wife.
Second, the talk will examine how the notion of mood swings in pregnancy as natural
is established and what concepts of nature are employed. Third I will compare discur-
sive constructions of PMS, another category of female psychopathology, and pregnant
mood swings. In doing so, I will show how PMS functions as a constitutive site for
pregnant mood swings.

Heather Milne
University of Winnipeg
Canada


Poetic Ecologies: Contemporary Innovative Feminist Poetics and the Politics of
Late Capitalism

This paper takes as its starting point Rosi Braidottis call for feminist theorists to rethink
the relationship among women, animals, machines, and technology in ethical and
politically accountable ways. Rather than turning to the marginal and hybrid genres of
science fiction or cyberpunk that Braidotti argues are most suited to an exploration of
these issues, I turn to another marginal and hybrid genre: contemporary experimental
feminist poetics. I argue that this body of writing offers an ideal locus for an articulation
of a nomadic, posthumanist, feminist subject position that is ethically, politically,
ecologically and materially embedded. I ground my argument with reference to several
recently published works of experimental poetry by women, including Marcella Durands
The Anatomy of Oil, Claudia Rankines Dont Let Me Be Lonely, Rita Wongs Forage
and Rachel Zolfs Human Resources to show how these writers enact a poetics of
rhyzomatic becomings and machinic assemblages. They utilize the language of
science, medicine, advertising, internet search engines and corporate communications
as raw material out of which to enact a poetics that advances a powerful and politicized
critique of late capitalism and the attendant issues of environmental devastation, the
exploitation of workers in a global marketplace, the marginalization of women, and the
rise of multinational corporations. Rather than using language as a transparent means
of communication, these poets experiment with ecopoetics and procedural, constraint-
based, and other forms of innovative poetics that treat language as an ecology and a
material substance that can mutate and become infected with viruses or polluted with
toxins. Through linguistic experimentation, these poets present powerful work that
engages critically and theoretically with questions of gender, nature and science in the
context of globalization and late capitalism.

Mona Motakef
Social Science Research Center Berlin
Germany


The Giving Sex: Gender Orders in Organ Donation in the Context of Organ
Shortage

In nearly all countrys in which organ transplantations are conducted, it is forbidden to
sellorgans. Furthermore, organs should be given voluntarily as gifts, as the term organ
donation indicates. The transplantation law in Iran is the only exception, here organs
can be sold. Within the culture of the gift of organ donation there is a stable pattern of a
gender order. Worldwide women donate organs, men receive them. Only in Iran there
are more men who are selling their organs, while also more men are buying organs.

With the enhancement of organs transplantation the demand of organs exceeds the
supply of organs. Since the early 1990ies there is a growing debate on how the pool on
transplantable organs can be extented. The culture of the gift of the transplantation
laws are held to be resonsible for the organ shortage. It is argued, when transplants are
seen as gifts they cannot asked for when needed and that other regulation like organ
clubs or even organ trade should be legaliced.

In my presentation I present parts of the US-american and German debate on organ
shortage. I discuss if the culture of the gift in organ donation has to be seen as an
indirect discrimination of women and where the greater willingness of women in organ
donation derives. Referring to the the sociological concept of the gift in addition to
Marcel Mauss and Pierre Boudieu I argue that the concept of a culture of a gift in organ
donation should not be misunderstood as a better economy. In contrairy restraints can
be shown easily. Whith the production of new concepts of transplantable organs such
as commodities or club goods, I carry out that our understand of being a bodily subject
is in flux.
Kirsten Mllegaard
University of Hawai'i at Hilo
USA


No Country for Soft Men: Cinema, Literature, and the Construction of Gender in
the Landscapes of the American West

The pristine landscapes of the American West are traditionally represented as the
natural setting for violent, action-packed narratives about cowboys and gunslingers.
These stories seek to establish universal truths about the triumph of good over evil, the
glory of the westward expansion of the American nation, and the preeminence of white
heterosexual masculinity. In traditional Western films and books, untamed wilderness
functions ideologically as a modus operandi for toughening up men to become self-
reliant, strong individuals in charge of their world. As Louis LAmour succinctly puts it in
his novel Heller With a Gun, the Wild West was a hard land that bred hard men to hard
ways. Within this cultural construction of the Western landscape as the natural
whetstone against which the American cowboy (and by extension the patriarchal values
he represents) hones his inner hero, women are associated with domesticity, town life,
institutions (particularly church and school) and other manifestations of culture in the
open landscape.

This paper examines how the triangulation between gender, nature and culture is re-
imagined in three contemporary film adaptations, Brokeback Mountain, The Three
Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and No Country for Old Men. Not only do these films
capitalize on the way gendered spaces are laid out in the traditional Western. They also
illustrate the elasticity of the Western genre by addressing contemporary social issues
about gender, violence, and sexual orientation with great political effect. Ironically,
however, their focus on heteronormativity and male experience solidifies the patriarchal
values that marginalize women and confine them to narrow domestic spaces in the
grand Western landscape.
Marianne Neuwirth
Stanford University
USA


The Gendering of Nature and Its Effects on Wilderness Organizations Practices

Nature has been framed by many cultures as both antagonist and elixir. When coupled
with feminine qualities its persona can shift between passivity, malleability, and
nurturance, or malevolence, irrationality, and volatility. The view taken is guided by
cultural norms and assumptions, which shape and are shaped by institutions,
conversations, non-verbal role-modeling, and so on.

In order to assess how organizations whose identities revolve around nature perceive
and gender nature, I examined two wilderness therapy programs in the western United
States, and analyzed (a) written and visual documents produced by the two programs;
(b) fieldnotes from my ethnographic field study, and (c) informal and follow-up interviews
with staff members and both program directors. I looked at how organizational
socialization, gender norms, and assumptions about nature converged in the training of
at-risk youth to survive in various wilderness settings.

My findings show that both programs frame nature androcentrically, both use gender-
exclusive language in relation to nature and abstract persons, and both use a rite of
passage model that parallels traditional (androcentric) organizational socialization
models. These factors led to some direct expressions of frustration by female program
participants.

This study also reveals the significance of particular persons in the socialization
process, as opposed to abstract organizational values or goals. It shows the
importance of micromoments of communication in conversational interchanges, which
suggests that greater attention to words, metaphorical representations, and inclusive
language could bolster these wilderness programs identified aims.

Overall this study casts doubt on current western conceptualizations of nature as
incorporated by these programs; these conceptualizations are based on views of nature
as a commodity to be used and consumed, and reveal constrained views of gender
roles and identities. I offer alternative and broader views of the natural world as an
invitation for readers and listeners consideration.


Venla Oikkonen
University of Helsinki
Finland


Thinking Back through Our Mothers: Mitochondrial Eve and the Narrative
Politics of Human Evolution

Since the early 1990s, advances in molecular genetics have increasingly recast
human evolution as a matter of molecular inheritance. In particular, the introduction
of the molecular clock, the use of rates of mutation to estimate evolutionary
divergence, has generated a new ancestral figure known as Mitochondrial Eve, our
matrilineal most recent common ancestor. In popular discourse, the discovery of
Mitochondrial Eve is often represented as marking a shift from the speculative work
of paleoanthropology to the technological advances associated with the Human
Genome Project. In stark contrast to evolutionary reconstructions based on fossil
evidence, the figure of Eve produces an illusion of specificity and continuity by
imagining descent as an unbroken line originating in one woman, with no need for
the missing link that haunted earlier accounts of human evolution. At the same
time, the exclusive focus of mitochondrial studies on genetic material inherited only
from the mother seems to engender a sense of narrative unease. Literally a matter of
thinking back through our mothers, as Virginia Woolf famously put it, the theory of
Mitochondrial Eve evokes ideologically charged debates about womens cultural
legacy. In this paper, I explore the ways in which popular accounts of Mitochondrial
Eve are implicated in discourses of gender, authority, and privilege. Through my
analysis of Bryan Sykess Seven Daughters of Eve and Stephen Oppenheimers Out
of Eden, I ask how popular accounts of Mitochondrial Eve negotiate cultural anxieties
raised by the idea of matrilineal descent. I argue that popular science texts appease
such anxieties by embedding the discovery of Mitochondrial Eve within a narrative of
scientific advance, which in turn is understood as an implicitly nationalistic narrative.

Tutta Palin
University of Helsinki
Finland


Female Artists Negotiating Early 20
th

Century Vitalism
In Art History, and more generally in Modernist Studies, discourses on Vitalism have
always been acknowledged as a relevant intellectual challenge to early 20
th

century
art. Until quite recently, feminist research has looked upon Vitalism as a vehicle for
biological reductionism, and therefore especially hostile towards women, both as
artistic subjects and objects of representation. Recent work by Anne Middleton
Wagner and other feminist art historians has, however, shown how some women
artists in fact struggled to face the challenge posed by Vitalism, negotiating for
example the concept of fertility for their own benefit. This re-evaluation has mainly
focused on avant-garde sculpture or on the explicitly modern medium of
photography. In my paper I am, instead, looking at allegedly conservative, main-
stream figurative painting, drawing and graphic art, featuring such worn-out topoi as
flower painting and the juxtapositioning of womens bodies and fruit. Intriguing re-
articulations of the relationship of women and nature can be found there as well,
forcefully challenging hierarchical notions of Modernism where the categories of
gender, generation, ethnicity and class tend to intersect.
I draw my examples from the production of four Finnish female artists of different
generations and with variously nuanced responses to Vitalism: Venny Soldan-
Brofeldt (18631945) who, as a decided exponent of a particularly Nordic discourse
of plein air Vitalism, depicted her female friend Maggie Gripenberg, the Finnish
pioneer of bare-footed Free Dance, in daring poses in the open air; Ester Helenius
(18751955) whose colouristic flower paintings were experienced as something
intensely virile by contemporary critics; Ingrid Ruin (18811956) who carnivalised
her own body in her almost obsessive picturing of herself; and the distinctly younger
Ina Behrsen-Colliander (19051985) who in her early graphics investigated
conceptions of fertility with intense personal-political motivation.
Tanja Paulitz
University of Graz
Austria


The Mechanical Machine under Negotiation: The Gender of Boundary Work
between Nature and Technology

The paper focuses on scientific knowledge in modern engineering from a science
studies and a gender studies perspective. Professional negotiations of the concepts
of the mechanical machine in the modern engineering discourse in late 19
th

century
are analyzed as constantly interwoven with professional politics of the field and with
gendered knowledge about the engineer. Based on a detailed analysis of debates
about the mechanical machine, where the boundary between technology and nature
was discussed controversially and where a hybrid version of the machine was
suggested, it is argued that there are two concepts of masculinity negotiated too:
firstly, the rational man who is considered gender neutral and, secondly, the man of
action legitimized by a naturally productive masculinity. Both are co-produced with
the machine as being hybrid or as being an object well-separated from nature.
The debate thus provides an excellent case for studying conflicting historical
versions of "how cultural representations of gender and nature have changed the
ways in which scientific projects are formulated" and in which the fundamentals of a
scientific domain, namely engineering science, were at stake. The analysis focuses
on engineering science, because it has been on the one hand largely neglected by
feminist science studies. Engineering is however on the other hand highly relevant
for today's developments of increasingly converging fields like bioengineering etc.
Accordingly, looking into history the case study questions the engineering side of the
technoscientific endeavour from a gender perspective. On this basis the paper also
suggests to do more research on the gendered cyborgs of modernity in relation to
engineering knowledge.

Keywords:
Knowledge, Engineering, Machine, Cyborg, Gender, Masculinity, Nature/Culture-
Boundary
Taru Peltola
Finnish Environment Institute
Finland


Man, Machine and Forest: Nature in the Working Practices of Logging
Contractors

This paper explores masculine action space in transition. Forest work is often
associated with masculine control of nature: industrial exploitation of nature, heavy
machines, hard work and lonely hours in the wilderness. In this paper I aim to depict
how the rising importance of environmental issues, such as renewable energy
production or biodiversity, changes forest work both as a material and social
practice. The paper is based on interviews with Finnish logging contractors who have
recently started bioenergy business. The key analytical concept is affordance which
addresses the constraints and possibilities of actors in their social, material and
natural working environments. Affordances, enacted through the material and social
practices of forest work, make visible distinctions in the working cultures and agency
of forest workers. These distinctions reveal tensions and hierarchies between the
masculinities of forest workers and their social networks thus highlighting the politics
of forest work. Therefore, the analysis of everyday forest work practices of bioenergy
production challenges the cultural assumption of forest work as a uniform utilitarian
nature-culture relationship.
Aneeta Rajendran
Delhi University
India


Malleable Bodies: Dykonstructing the Fe/male Body

Female homosexuality and homoeroticism can both be read as powerful
destabilizers of the cultural scripts that the female body is given in received
assumptions of how the natural body "is" with the help of specific Indian literary and
cinematic texts. In this paper, I will examine how this received script of gendering can
be performed in different ways by heterosexual and homosexual women. The
dimorphism of gender can be broken when the subject lays claim to her body as a
self-identified dyke, or butch lesbian. In this instance, the body thus shaped can
be visibly performing the codes of masculinity on female bodies,thus disrupting the
seamless coupling of femininity to female bodies and masculinity to
masculine bodies. The femme-identified subject, or a subject who desires other
women and seeks to attract them can perform a less-easily recognisable
performance that nuances femininity so that it yields resonances that make it
available to pleasures other than thoseof heterosexuality or heteronormative
procreative functions.

With the help of a few select texts literary as well as cinematic I shall study how
the different erotic responsibilities that are assumed by the homoerotic female
subject literally lead to the re-scripting of the perceived social histories of gender. I
shall focus specifically on Qamar Roshanabadi's contributions to the
anthology Facing the Mirror, where the persona the pseudonymous author assumes
wishes to change her gender, from male to female, but lacking the resources
required for medically-mediated transition, this
persona literally rips her breasts off. Alongside, I shall compare Kari, the eponymous
heroine of Amruta Patil's graphic novel where Kari's resistance to conventional
feminine appearances attains a more easily available androgyny that does not
require literally disfigurement.In addition to these instances of what we might call,
following J udith Halberstam, female masculinity, I shall examine Suniti Namjoshi's
oeuvre where genderlessness is attained by the narratorial voice actively breaking
the anthromorphic expectations
that readers expect by default: Namjoshi's characters are wolves, birds or witches
from fairy tales.

The malleability of the female body will also be studied in the light of how its
eroticism can become available for a female audience. Films like Girlfriend and
Kaliyug weigh in at one end as commercialising this eroticisation for a general
audience while still retaining a certain evaluative, censorial control on the erotic
potential they
exhibit. Films like Shamim Saraf's I Can't Think Straight (2007, English) and Ligy
Pulapally's Sancharam (2004, Malayalam), do so for an almost entirely lesbian
intended audience. Deshatanakkili Karayarilla, a Malayalam film (1987) that predates
the GLQBT movements that gained steam in the last two decades, I argue, is a
film that permits a space for the expression of erotic preferences that are not tied to
exclusive one-time identifications.

These malleabilities, I argue, are expressions of the vulnerability of the bonds that tie
anatomical gender to social gender and sexual orientation, as literary theorists like
J udith Butler, and scientific theorists like Anne Fausto-Sperling have powerfully and
persuasively argued. The works of the Indian writers I mention above function in
deconstructing or Dyk-onstructing the implied identity of this bond in ways that
may be productively examined.
Malin Noem Ravn
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Norway


Extraordinarily Natural? Cultural Conceptions of the Pregnant Body

The female body seems always to have been associated with nature in Western
thought, or, with Ortners classic phrasing: as closer to nature. In this presentation I
want to pursue the idea of the natural female body in one of its specific
manifestations in contemporary Norway; the pregnant body as extraordinarily
natural.

Based on in-depth interviews with pregnant women, I will trace how these women
talk about their bodies, and specifically about the changes in their bodies. The core
theme in these stories is the perceived uncontrollability that the women experience,
an uncontrollability that they interpret to be the work of nature. This uncontrollability
both threatens their personal autonomy, but also provides them with the image of the
intentional and knowledgeable body, and as such also potentially strengthens their
sense of self.

I will discuss how the concept of nature works as a device for self-understanding in
this context, and specifically focus on how the pregnant women mould
understandings of their bodies and particular understandings of nature
simultaneously.
LeeAnne M. Richardson
Georgia State University
USA


Stories of an African Farm: Engendering the Nature/Culture Debate

Victorian evolutionary science supported contradictory claims concerning womens
rightful roles. While one construal of evolutionary biology deemed women uniquely fit
to be wives, mothers, and caregivers, late-century women writers began to use the
trope of evolutionary progress as a means to argue that womens spheres would
expand and that their advancement was inevitable. The evolutionary model also allowed
women to account for the lack of current progress (incremental change over the course
of generations would not be immediately visible) but nonetheless offer hope that change
would come. Olive Schreiners 1883 novel The Story of an African Farm enacts this
cultural debate through the complementary narrative modes employed by its two main
characters, Lyndall and Waldo.

Lyndall insists that womens nature is unknowable because culture intervenes: the
world tells us what we are to be, and shapes us by the ends it sets before us, she
claims. (Any knowledgeable reader would recognize J . S. Mills influence on Lyndalls
argument, thereby reinforcing Schreiners contention that knowledge about women
comes to us not from observation, science, or nature, but via words and images
reproduced in our culture.) Waldo, however, expresses a scientific-evolutionary mode of
understanding, evident in the allegory inspired by the grave post he carves: in this
gradualist narrative, the Hunter of Truth slowly chips away at the layers of mystification
and obfuscation that block the path to Truth. He works daily, never reaching Truth
himself but clearing a path for future Hunters. In combining the logical deductions of
Lyndall with the evolutionary mode of Waldo, Schreiner emphasizes the idea that
womens roles cannot be narrowly confined to their biological functions, and that
expanding womens roles means evolution (a move toward Truth) and not devolution.

Schreiners most compelling insight into gender roles, however, comes through the
character of Gregory Rose, who is most himself when disguised as a woman. In
womans garb for the first time, he wonders: Am I, am I Gregory Nazianzen Rose?
Surprisingly, he finds that he is a better, more fulfilled man when allowed to act as a
traditional woman. With this transformation, Schreiner demonstrates that while
character may be inborn, it is not determined by gender.
Lisa Rosenthal
University of Illinois
USA


Nature, Imagination, and Artifice in the Art of Julie Heffernan

In works like Self-Portrait as Thing in the Forest, (2002) the contemporary New York
painter J ulie Heffernan mobilizes the style, technique, and semiotics of 17th-century
European art as a supple language for her own dazzling images (examples of her work
are at: http://www.ppowgallery.com/artists/J ulieHeffernan/index.html). Simultaneous
effects of exacting description and elaborate artifice run through her oeuvre, in which,
notably, most of her pictures are titled Self-Portraits. This paper explores how
Heffernans art interrogates and wittily deploys the historical intertwining of notions of
gender, nature, and arts seductions in order to make salient the anxieties informing the
continued desire to conceptualize nature as female, and our current cultural unease
with the feminine notion of art as a realm of fecund and disorderly imagination.

Cultural historians and historians of science have analyzed how ideologies of gender
informed the rise in 17
th

century Europe of an Enlightenment and capitalist model of
nature as passive, female, and subject to male control and use for profit. Historians of
art have noted that in the same period the artistic rendering of nature assumed new
cultural status as a means of describing, knowing and possessing the world, while
theories of visual art celebrated both its instrumental descriptive power and its
feminine imaginative artifice. Heffernans art refers to all of these traditions as she
uncannily subjects flora, fauna --the stuff of the world, including her own figure -- to an
exacting and unruly visual technique in pictures that re-enact paintings capacity to
capture and remake observed nature as a source of beauty and horror. Heffernan
invites our avid gaze while insisting that naturalistic depiction is a complex act that now,
as in earlier eras, depends fundamentally on gendered concepts of nature and of art.
Kirsi Saarikangas
University of Helsinki
Finland


But We Did Have a Forest! Lived Suburban Spaces in the Helsinki Metropolitan
Area in the 1950s and 1960s

The chaos reigned in the courtyard, because houses around us were still under
construction. (---) But what about that! We did have a FOREST! This is the way a
woman who moved into Kontula suburb in eastern Helsinki in 1966 as a young
mother described her new home district.

Passage points out the importance of the nature in the suburban habitation and,
indirectly, discusses the relations between planned and unplanned suburban
environment. My paper is focuses on the role of nature in the formation of
meaningful lived spaces in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area during the 1950s and
1960s. It is based on the analysis of suburban space and the written memories of
living in suburbs.

Writers repeatedly praised the spaciousness and modern conveniences of their new
dwellings; however, it is noteworthy that the appearance of new housing areas
received less attention than the surrounding nature, which was depicted sensuously.
In the inhabitants narratives, the relationship between the settled and unsettled land
was a key feature of suburban habitation. For the generations who have grown up in
the suburbs, the meanings of the environment were essentially formed in the
relationships between built and unbuilt and the constant crossing of borders.

In the experiences of suburban habitation, unplanned and unused land seemed to
soften the anonymity and austerity of suburban architecture and to break its
uniformity. Nature formed a reverse side of architecture. Woods and idle lands
allowed transitions from one space and time for another. Instead of the opposite of
architecture, I suggest that (suburban) nature might be regarded as the condition of
architecture. It both disturbed the homogeneity of modern uniform architectural
environment and created new spaces within it. The suburban space is an
entanglement of nature and culture where pure nature cannot be distinguished from
pure culture. Suburban nature actively engendered meanings and interacted with
architecture. Suburban spaces are historically stratified wholes that are produced by
the processes of nature and human action together being hence both artefacts and
nature.
Cornelia Schadler
University of Vienna
Austria


Posthuman Birth: Becoming Parents

pregnancy and birth are labeled as something truly natural by many becoming parents,
midwifes, birthcourse teachers or advisory books
1
aware of the technological diffusion of the becoming bodies. Parents use hormones,
. However people are also
ovulation test or in vitro fertilization to get pregnant. During pregnancy they
take cocktails of medicines and dietary supplements. According to their knowledge
how to behave for the best child outcomes, becoming parents change their diet
and life style. And they engage scans, ultrasounds and sonographies on a regular
basis. From a posthumanist view becoming parents is no natural experience or
procedure: parents and children are created by several entities working together.
The process includes human (organic) material and objects (technology).

This view also changes the definition of human beings or subjects, their gender
and their transformation processes. Humans are artifacts created in processes
before and after birth. The process of transition to parenthood gives an option to
access practices of creating life as well as practices of transforming existing humans.
During this process a child and new parents are born. Subjects (humans) should be
defined as arrays of organic and material activities. Becoming parents
transform by engagements of partnerships with new technologies and practices
to integrate new objects into their everyday life. Mothers and fathers do not just
themselves become new subjects, their material environment is transformed as
well. The apartment is adapted with new furniture, things and colors and new virtual
and material spaces are occupied and visited by parents. Additionally father
and mother do not always act as separate individuals. At several moments on their
journey to parenthood they form a unity in which their gender is undoing and their
boundaries as individuals become fuzzy.

However, the practices during pregnancy and shortly after birth (re)create gendered
bodies of mothers and fathers with a special relationship to each other and
to their (material) environment. After birth a retraditionalization to clearly distinguishable

1
The data for this talk comes from my dissertation on the topic transformation of subjects during
transition to parenthood. The aim of my project was to explain the transformation processes
from a different theoretical and methodical point of view than used within family studies and to
obtain new answers to the problem of dramatic transformations at the transition to parenthood. The
task was to find a variety of elements that concur with the parents during transition to parenthood
and how these elements change the parents. Methodically I conducted a multi method ethnographic
study that included interviews (with couples, gynecologists, midwifes and technicians),
observations (in hospitals, birth courses and public places), documents (books, bulletin boards)
and visual data (pictures from labour rooms, home videos). The dissertation is fully funded by a
DOC-Sholarship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

gender roles occurs usually. My talk will focus on those artificial
humans that recreate a natural biological self as nurturing mother and responsible
father in their practices out of arrays of organic and material activities.
Naomi Scheman
University of Minnesota
USA


The Universe Is Made of Stories

Those who urge a material turn in feminist theory argue that social constructivism
focuses on signification at the expense of materiality, on culture at the expense of
nature. While the material turn aims at challenging that dichotomy, there is a way of
understanding social constructivism that actually models such a challenge. I draw
this model from my arguments, since the 1970s, that particular thingsnot just
categories or kinds of things, like gender or raceare socially constructed. My
original arguments concerned particular instances of mental phenomena (e.g. being
angry), which, I argued, fail to constitute complex phenomena in abstraction from a
social context that makes of various thoughts, sensations, and behavior a coherent
whole. This account was feminist in attending to the political nature of the patterns
we see and dont see, to the ways in which we construct the possibilities of, for
example, womens anger.

I want to extend this account to things in general: Any particular thing (a person, an
organism, a stone) is a thing only in relation to the things around it: what it is just is
the difference it makes to other things and the differences they make to it. Things,
that is, are stories. To be socially constructed is thus a special case of being
contextually constructed, and social constructivism is a special case of a relational
account of material things. It follows from such an account of thingness that
knowing a thing (such as a stone) requires learning from its neighbors; and
community-based participatory research replaces the laboratory as the paradigmatic
site for scientific knowledge. The ethics of knowing calls for listening for things own
stories and the stories of their neighbors, as well as the stories we become part of as
we interact with the objects of our knowledge.
Shahanah, Schmid / Sandy, Ross
London School of Economics and Political Sciences
United Kingdom


Virtually Healthy: Locating Nature, Gender and Illness in Virtual Bodies

Medicine has a history of ambivalence towards nature. Disease is seen as being of
nature whilst at the same time medicine endeavours to remove the disease, thus
restoring natural health. This ambivalence is further complicated by gender, as
womens bodies in particular have been constructed as unwell by nature and in
need of medical control or discipline. Considering this framing of the female body
in which illness is a general quality of womens bodies, rather than having a specific
bodily location health conditions that are ambivalent with respect to their somatic
location promise to be particularly revealing for inquiries into the dynamic relations
between nature and gender. In this paper, the focus is on the everyday experiences
and practices of women suffering from such conditions. For these women, online
networks are important sources of support and information. Through participating in
such communities, women reconfigure and reconstruct their ill bodies online,
generating new (or re-configuring previous) bodily practices.

We have observed such innovations in bodily practices in two online settings: a self-
help group for chronic pain sufferers in Second Life; and a discussion forum for
women experiencing infertility or involuntary childlessness. In both localities
participants struggle with conditions that are often impossible to locate within the
body, and thus particularly revealing of concepts of natural health. Using tools and
possibilities enabled by information technology to create virtual bodies, which might
alternatively symbolize health or disease, natural givens or technological
possibilities, women actively negotiate and strategically employ the ambivalent and
ambivalently gendered relations between nature and health. In this paper we will
trace the complex relations and paradoxical simultaneities found in such virtual
health practices, with a particular focus on the ambivalent and dynamic relations
between nature, health and gender.

Deborah Seddon
Rhodes University
South Africa


Tar is a holy place: Natural Difference and the Colonization of Nature in Toni
Morrisons Tar Baby

J udith Butler observes that what we invoke as the naturalized knowledge of gender is,
in fact, a changeable and revisable reality. The naturalization of racial difference works
in a similar fashion. Race, as Henry Louis Gates J r. notes, is a dangerous trope: the
figuration of ultimate, irreducible difference between peoples and cultures which is
used to will this sense of natural difference into our formulations. This paper will
critically examine how the depiction of the natural environment in Toni Morrisons Tar
Baby (1981) both underwrites and destabilizes the notion of natural difference in terms
of gender and race. Tar Baby, a complex argument about the future of black gendered
identity in the United States, takes the form of a vexed love affair between the
protagonists Son and J adine. Significantly, the novel is not set primarily in the United
States but in the Caribbean: one of the earliest sites of Europes global imperialism. The
Isle des Chevaliers is represented as a historically black island associated with a
mythological race of blind horsemen descended from slaves. The island is now a
playground for wealthy white Americans such as J adines patron, Valerian Street, who
lives in his magnificent house isolated from the natural environment and the islands
ancestral connections. The paper will examine how Morrison deploys the natural
environment as a significant character in the novel: one who is insulted,
brokenhearted, and demented by the impact of colonization. Furthermore, the
islands tar pit, figured as a site of the residue of the twinned processes of colonial
violence and environmental destruction, functions in the novel, as described by
Morrison in interviews, as a holy place. As the paper will demonstrate, what is most
intriguing about Morrisons representation of the islands natural environment is the
means by which it is not only gendered but raced.
Tiina Suopajrvi
University of Oulu
Finland


Talking and Experiencing Femininity in Masculine Forestry

Finnish forestry is gendered. Though there are no official boundaries preventing
women to enter forestry, many unofficial, in other words cultural and social
boundaries still exist. In forestry engineers biographical interviews the ways girls and
boys have been socialized into work and forest in rural Finland show, how
sex/gender system of labor has taken boys to the woods with their fathers, while girls
have helped their mothers at home or in a barn. In the interviews women
reminiscence being bitter due to these arrangements and longing for the forest. In
playtime both girls and boys have, however, spent their time in a forest with friends
feeling hidden from the adults control and hence free from social expectations.
These women consider themselves having been different from other girls; they were
boisterous tomboys who liked to challenge boys and loved danger.

Despite the expectations interviewed women have chosen to educate themselves in
forestry institutes and are nowadays working as forestry professionals. Their
descriptions of themselves and of natural femininity and masculinity are
contradictory; in other words, they do not fit into prevailing dichotomous sex/gender
system, but they neither question its naturalness. They still describe themselves
through exceptional, more masculine femininity; through outward features, like
clothing, lack of makeup, and presence; and through personality, like stubbornness,
frankness, and being able to talk back and to use rough lumberjack language. At
the same time women are defined naturally as social, caring, and considerate, both
by men and women themselves. In my presentation I will discuss further these
multiple femininities and masculinities of female forestry engineers, and their impacts
on interviewees current forest relations; but also how the interview context of oral
history project called Forestry Professions in Changing Society may have affected
womens life stories.


Minna Uimonen
Finland


Telling the Story of Biophobia


Biophobia is a notion often used when criticizing cultural gender studies (f. ex.
Campbell 2002; Vandermassen 2005; Davis 2009). It is a word with a loose meaning
yet forceful resonance. But what does it mean for gender studies or feminist
theorizing to be biophobic? In this paper I shall examine how the notion is biophobia is
used, what kind of meanings it assumes, and how the usage historically emerges in
various consecutive texts. I shall also focus on how the narrative of feminist
biophobia is told. Rather than defining it succinctly, the issue of biophobia is
recounted with a broad, often associative narrative. The authors also offer a specific
historical narrative to explain the emergence of knee-jerk social constructionism and
extreme environmentalism (see f.ex. Campbell 2002). I will be looking at what kind
of histories and theoretical lineages this storytelling produces. (Cf. Hemmings 2005).
As a further effect, the story of biophobia endemic in the field gender studies
establishes the position of biologically / materialistically / evolutionary-oriented
research on gender and fe/male differences. This disciplinary move is complicated,
however, by the fact that at the turn-of-millenium theoretical debate on the nature of
gender all parties call for non-dualistic conceptualizations of naturecultures. I shall
end my paper by a brief evaluation of how this field looks once the notion of
biophobia has been untangled.

Campbell, Anne (2002) A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davis, Noela (2009) New Materialism and Feminism's Anti-Biologism: A Response
to Sara Ahmed, European Journal of Womens Studies 16(1): 6780.
Hemmings, Clare (2005) Telling Feminist Stories, Feminist Theory 6(2): 115139.
Vandermassen, Griet (2005) Whos Afraid of Charles Darwin? Debating Feminism
and Evolutionary Theory. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Maija Urponen
University of Helsinki
Finland

Gendered Landscapes, Racialized Climates: A Northern Miss Universe on a Lap
of Honour around the World.

On a cold day in February 1953, the current titleholder for Miss Universe, Armi Kuusela
of Finland, boarded a plane at the Helsinki airport in order to start her lap of honour
around the world. The tour, however, was cut short by Armi Kuuselas surprise wedding
in Tokyo and subsequent migration to the Philippines. In this paper I analyze at the
coverage of the tour from Finland to Central and Southern Europe and onwards to
South and South East Asia in the Finnish media, paying specific attention to the
representation of domestic and foreign landscapes and climates and the way they
shaped and were shaped by discourses of gender, race and class.

In the media coverage (most of it written only after the fact of Armi Kuuselas foreign
marriage and migration) landscape and climate became metaphors for hierarchical
differences between us and them. How would the fair beauty from the cool North
ever get used to the stifling heat of the South Eastern Asia, was a question that
seemed to bedevil the Finnish public. The climatic differences were represented as
racial differences and taken as a sign of the insurmountable divide between modern,
advanced and gender equal North and backward and patriarchal South. Even so,
the media also alleviated these very differences by locating the transnational romance
not in Manila, the crowded and sweltering home town of the groom, but in the more
serene landscapes of Baguio, the summer capital of the previous US colonial rule in
Philippines, and the air-conditioned rooms of the grooms wealthy family home.
Whereas climatic differences were used as a metaphor for insurmountable cultural,
racial and geopolitical differences, air-conditioning as a manifestation of modern
technology and Western affluence became a symbol for the possession of and control
over these differences. At the same time, I argue, the sexual transgression of Armi
Kuusela, a feminine representation of the Finnish nation, was domesticated and
reembedded into the national narrative as upward mobility in the global hierarchies of
class and (post)colonial geopolitics.

Eeva Urrio
University of Helsinki
Finland


Grosz, Darwin, and the Future of Sexual Differences

Like for so many other feminists, or for any movement or theory that criticizes the
now and aims at changing it, the idea of a different future is crucial in the feminist
philosophy if Elizabeth Grosz. According to her, feminism should aim at a future that
is radically and unpredictably different from the present, and that profoundly
challenges the present views on gender and sexuality.

The theoretical background of Groszs thought lies strongly on Gilles Deleuzes
ontological views and Luce Irigarays philosophy of sexual difference. These two
strands dont necessarily go together smoothly, which presents certain challenges
for Groszs feminist philosophical project. In her more recent works, Grosz has
increasingly sought inspiration from the works of Charles Darwin, explicitly giving his
writings a mediating role between Deleuzes and Irigarays thought. According to
Grosz, what makes Darwin crucially important for feminism is precisely that change
and the future are at the center of his thought. In her reading of Darwin, Grosz
emphasizes most of all Darwins dynamic understanding of life and the open nature
of evolution. In addition, through the theory of sexual selection, Grosz presents
Darwin as a key thinker of sexual difference.

In this paper, I explore the role of Darwin and evolutionary theory in Groszs feminist
philosophy. I ask how, and to what affects, Grosz connects Darwins thought to the
philosophies of Deleuze and Irigaray. More specifically, my interest lies in examining
the thought of sexual difference that Grosz is constructing with her Darwinian project:
what is it exactly that Darwin, according to Grosz, offers to the thinking of sexual
differences and to the project for thinking a feminist future radically different from the
present.

Marja Vehvilinen
University of Tampere
Finland


Gender, Technology Mediated Nature and Everyday Practices: NGO Accounts

People use and shape nature in everyday practices, for example, in cooking,
accommodation, transportation or (research) work. They consume natural resources in
the ways that have consequences for the sustainability of nature. The use of ICT may
save energy, but it also intensifies the energy use of households. The nature in
everyday practices, present in the materiality of food or ICT, is of a technologically
mediated kind. It further connects to global production chains. As a consequence,
governments, authorities and also non-governmental groups (NGO) have produced
(institutional) texts to guide citizens to build their everyday practices in a manner, which
saves and respects nature. These everyday practices are gendered. For example,
climate change causes destructive effects on nature in developing countries and makes
especially poor women in those countries suffer.

The presentation describes preliminary results of a new research Gendered agency and
Technically mediated nature. I examine the texts of Finnish environmental NGOs and
womens organisations directed to local citizens everyday practices of nature and ask
how do these texts shape gendered agency. Generally, NGOs do not articulate the
connection between gender and nature and the presentation looks for tensions between
the goals of gender equality and sustainable use of natural resources. The Womens
organisation Marthas, for example, pay largely attention to the savings of natural
resources and they have developed also guidelines for ecological practices.
Simultaneously, the understanding of gender in these guidelines is mainly built through
a conventional heterosexual family and gendered division of labour.
Marianne Winther J rgensen
Ume University
Sweden


Whats New in New Theories of Materiality? Performativity and Agency
Revisited

A flow of new and fascinating work now foregrounds the importance of materiality/ies
in every aspect of life and research. A variety of bodies populate empirical
investigations (of humans, animals, things), and the theoretical ambition is to
transcend the divide between nature and culture.

Often, this new work is accompanied by sharp lines of demarcation. Earlier research,
for instance social constructivism, is criticised for limiting its field of vision to
humans and their representations, disregarding all other parts of reality. Some
commentators protest this dismissal and consider it to be illegitimate boundary work
serving to establish a fresh new field of materiality studies, and they point out
precursors who deserve commemoration and acknowledgment.

Whether a body of knowledge is truly something new or not, is, of course, a futile
question in any deeper sense of the words. But what needs further inventory, I will
argue, are the more specific lines of continuity and break between now and then. If
we reject wholesale earlier research, we risk instead repeating it against all
intentions: We risk doing the same job over again, instead of incorporating previous
insights and developing underdeveloped potentials. And, even more importantly, if
we leave unexamined shared assumptions between now and then, we risk
repeating exactly the same drawbacks as before.

My starting point is that we cannot deal with the questions of continuities and breaks
in one all-embracing sweep. We rather need to scrutinise a range of theoretical and
philosophical building blocks and the history of their articulation. In particular, in my
presentation, I will consider two such building blocks, namely performativity and
agency. Both of these are central to new work on materiality at the same time as
both have a long history within social research.

Yuenmei Wong
University of Maryland
USA


Gender, Sexuality and Marginal Positioning of the Pengkids and Their Girlfriends

This article is a result of a context-specific research on one of the non-normative female
genders and sexualities in Malaysia, the Pengkids and their girlfriends. This article
focuses on the study of non-heterosexuality and non-normative genders with an
emphasis on the socio-cultural and political processes that underpin its construction or
reproduction. Recent study of non-normative genders and sexualities, especially in
anthropology and history had introduced new interpretations to enlighten our
understanding of the dynamics, fluidity and diversity of genders and sexualities. One of
its significant accomplishments is to prompt us to re-think or even challenge the
preconceived notions about gender and sexuality. This article aspires to deconstruct the
assumed naturalness and timelessness of the binary sex/gender and
heteronormativity, and to provide a more nuanced understanding of gender and sexual
diversity, and its implication on the choices of those who embody such gender and
sexual identities.


Sigrun seb
University of Bergen
Norway


Re-reading Norwegian Landscapes

The concept of landscape plays an important part in the construction of Norwegian
identity both historically and today. By drawing attention to contemporary Norwegian
women artists and their re-working of landscape painting I want to focus on gender and
sexual differences as they are involved in the aesthetics of landscape. Landscape within
this paper is seen not as passive object or space of identification, but as an active force
in the construction of national, gendered, artistic identities.

A central element in dealing with landscape is our perception of space, and how space
is formed in and by social, psychic, and cultural subjectivities and in turn shapes those
categories. Women and men are accorded different access to the imaginary, social or
geographical spaces that form the basis of landscape art, and hence placed differently
in relation to national identity. Within romanticism and neo-romantic traditions,
landscape is often placed as mirror to the soul of the artist. Within the tradition of the
sublime, it is also a site for the investigation of the borders between the self and its
other, the material and the transcendent. Here I propose that the quotations of
canonical artists and the iconography of Romanticism and neo-romanticism in the work
of artists Marianne Heske, Mari Slaattelid, Tiril Schrder and A K Dolven can be read as
investigations of what being or performing as woman might mean within the spaces of
a Nordic tradition. All deconstruct canonical masculine artist positions leaving an open
space for the possibility of the feminine. They deal with the body, its boundaries,
placements and sensuousness in ways that not only oppose the canon but ultimately
can be read as a differencing of it.