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Decolonizing Gender: Gender Diversity from a Transnational Perspective
Decolonizing Gender: Gender Diversity from a Transnational Perspective
Abstract Submissions Closed
Thursday, 25 February 2021: 16:00-17:30
Location:
RC32 Women, Gender and Society (host committee)
Language: English
Session Type: Oral
Over the past few decades, gender and citizenship have become intertwined as a consequence of struggles aimed at the redefinition of the rights of women and LGBTQ+ individuals. These movements, a central feature of the social and political dynamics initiated in the 20th century, rose to a peak when the notion of a gendered self conforming to binary categories of femininity and masculinity started to be challenged. Against this backdrop, the division between the West and the “rest” became important, with the rise of contrasting imaginaries of transgender communities outside the West, which are either viewed as havens of traditional acceptance – normally corrupted by Western colonial powers and the gender schemes of modernity – or depicted as places of infringement of basic human rights. The confrontation between the global North and the global South permeates the notions and possibilities for gender diversity itself. While pre-colonial understandings often feed Western imageries, the West continues to play a key role in the current struggles in favour of gender diversity. Are these present-day movements offering redemption or re-colonization? Are these movements feeding unreal narratives of past and present that reinstate the opposition between tradition and modernity? Continuing the discussion started at the ISA Congress in Toronto (2018), this call for papers intends to foster reflection on how transnational movements for gender diversity might operate through the mobilization of paradoxical categories, which do not always provide the basis for the decolonization of gender and the visibility of categories and lives in non-Western geographies.
Session Organizers: