New directions of practice and performativity
Location: AgC132.1 (lower floor).
Programme:
Friday (October 9):
15:00 Opening: Arja Turunen & Pasi Saarimäki
15:10-15:40 Nora Brandt (Åbo Akademi University, Vasa, Finland): Trojan horses in the stable: The stable as an arena for gender performances
15:40-16:10 Pasi Saarimäki (University of Jyväskylä): Unmarried fathers in the courtroom - assertion of threatened sexual repute in central-Finland in the late 19th century
16:10-16:40 Chui Ping, Iris Kam (Cardiff University, Wales, UK): Go beyond Gender boundaries: Insights from the Research Development regarding Teenage Girls in Contemporary Hong Kong
Saturday (October 10):
9:00-9:30 Pinar Kaygan (University of Sheffield, UK): Designing gender and gendering design: Doing gender through the practice of industrial design
9:30-10:00 Arja Turunen (University of Jyväskylä): Adoption of trousers into women's dress - study of dress as gendered bodily practice
10:00-10:30 Jung-Tsung Yang (National Taipei University, Taiwan): Folding Deleuze and Guattari: gender, fashion and ecology
10:30-10:45 Coffee break
10:45-11:15 Minna Leinonen (University of Oulu, Finland): Making gender in/visible
11:15-11:45 Sofia Kotilainen (University of Jyväskylä): Gendered name-giving practices in Finnish rural communities (c. 1700–1960)
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Approved participants in alphaphetical order
Brandt, Nora: Trojan horses in the stable: The stable as an arena for gender performances
In Finland there has been a significant change in the use of horses in the past decades. Until the 1960s, horses have been primarily used for transportation and work at the farms. But the 70s and 80s became a start for a more hobby oriented horse keeping. In the 90s the rate of hobby riders grew significant, and became a notable hobby especially for girls and adult women. The gender aspect in the equestrian hobby is remarkable, 98% of the junior members (under age 19) are girls, and women make 90 percent of the senior members (over age 19). The aim of the presentation is to examine what kind of gendered practices riding and horse keeping enable for those active in the sport. The empirical material is based on 10 interviews with young adult women. All the informants have been very active in horseback riding and stable life during their childhood and youth, and the majority of the informants were still active when the interviews were carried out. The results show how the stable contains both traditional male practises and positions (e.g. strength, leadership, goal orientation), as well as traditional female practices and positions (e.g. nurture, care, emotions). In the stables, girls and women must take part in both set of practises and positions. Using Judith Butlers terminology, this means the stables becomes an arena for “continuous” as well as “discontinuous” gender performances. In a sense, this means that the stable forms a “Trojan horse” for girls: riding seems to be a girls’ hobby, but many of the practices that are to be carried out in the stable are considered to be “typical male” practices.
Kaygan, Pinar: Designing gender and gendering design: Doing gender through the practice of industrial design
Almost every work is associated with some form of masculinity or femininity, either implicitly or explicitly. Considering gender as 'doing' rather than 'being' allows us to better understand this association process, since it restates that work is not gendered naturally and inherently, but through social interactions. More importantly, this approach can strengthen the notion that gender can be 'done' or 'redone' in different ways, challenging the stereotypical images of 'woman' and 'man' based on dichotomies. It can support a contingent, unstable and context-dependent 'doing' of gender that encompasses plural femininities and masculinities, which are performed continuously within professional and organisational practices. Due to its heterogeneity and diversity, industrial design practice provides a rich context to observe articulations of gender in various aspects of professional life, such as industrial sectors (a broad range from furniture to transportation), work environments (design offices, manufacturing establishments etc.) and interdisciplinary relations (working with experts from engineering, marketing, manufacturing etc.). In this study, my aim is to investigate the complexity of the process in which work is gendered, focusing on the interactions between these aspects. By using interviews conducted with industrial design professionals, I will explore the ways in which the designer's work is identified as 'feminine' or 'masculine' through professional and organisational practices, and how the 'doing gender' approach can be useful to reveal the plural and unstable nature of these associations.
Kotilainen, Sofia: Gendered name-giving practices in Finnish rural communities (c. 1700–1960)
My presentation deals with naming practices in Finnish rural family communities, and the ways of thinking that they reveal, over a long period of time. Naming customs were generally closely linked to gender. Apart from the fact that forenames were divided into men's names and women's names, the sex of a child also affected the number of names s/he was given and whether s/he was given an inherited name or names. Particularly in eastern Finnish families, the naming culture was traditionally patriarchal. Through name-giving practices people have expressed in a very self-evident but implicit way the differences between men and women. As social phenomenon the process of defining gender begins already in early childhood. The choice of forename is one of the first significant factors that perform the gender and shape a person’s identity. In my presentation I consider, how gendered name-giving practices were produced with the help of symbolic names and life stories connected to them. The forenames that came to be identification marks of the family were characteristically inherited from the father, particularly so in the case of the names of farmers who were the heads of their families. However, the material relating to the families studied here reveals whether there was also a place in the family for names inherited through the female line.
Minna Leinonen: Making gender in/visible
I am interested in how gender is actualized in different work-related contexts, how and through what kind of situational understanding and reasoning it becomes in/visible. Feminist linguist Deborah Cameron proposes that, instead of taking social categories such as gender for granted, we should investigate where ‘men’ and ‘women’ come from. She suggests a change of perspective: maybe it is the practices that produce people’s identities and not the other way around. In her approach we must constantly reproduce our gendered identities by performing what are taken to be the appropriate acts in the communities we belong to. Cameron relies on the popular but also contested performative theory of Judith Butler. The paper is a part of my PhD study in social psychology on gender and interaction in working life. It is based on two kinds of data: Firstly, interview data from large male-dominated work organisations, the Finnish Defence Forces and the field of criminal sanctions. It seems that gendered bodies, hiding or making gender visible are relevant to the employees in those organisations, especially to female ones. Secondly, I have data from group discussion sessions on promoting gender equality at workplaces among representatives of different work organisations. These work conference sessions are based on the idea to mix people from different workplaces and hierarchies for intense benchmarking processes on workplace development. I am especially interested in how gender categories and their characterisations are involved in the process of creating and maintaining mutual understanding.
Iris Kam, Chui Ping: Go beyond Gender boundaries: Insights from the Research Development regarding Teenage Girls in Contemporary Hong Kong
In Hong Kong, representations of teenage girls, albeit superficial ones, may exist in research focused on gender issues or youth issues. Teenage girls are mentioned only when there is any age or gender difference (in binary and biological sense) subdivided in the analysis. It was not until the early 21st century that girls were regarded as an individual research topic; individual in the sense that the research focused on the present conditions of teenage girls, instead of their aspirations to become women in future. Even so, the binary logic of thinking gender is still implicit in Hong Kong. For maintaining the restrictive/ repressive framework of domination and subordination, voices/ images of teenage girls have always been ignored in the discursive practices. This paper therefore argues that the emphasis on the category of ‘woman’, despite the lack of clarity as to the content of this category, not only hinders the destructive power of poststructuralist approach on the category ‘woman’ but also makes the category ‘girl’ an invisible project for examination. The purpose of this paper is to look for the possibility to make the category ‘girl’ visible for examination. To construct girl as a theoretical concept means to reconsider girlhood as a concept not exclusively on the path of becoming woman, but as an independent concept that deserves examination in its own right. The issue relating to this reconsideration is indeed the reconsideration of how gender and age take place in structuring the lives of teenage girls in a productive force.
Pasi Saarimäki: Unmarried fathers in the courtroom - assertion of threatened sexual repute in central-Finland in the late 19th century
The aim of my presentation is to examine the role of unmarried fathers in the court, and how they acted there. My source material is court cases, which deal maintenance of illegitimate children. Particularly, I am interested in how men looked and reacted, while their threatened sexual repute was at issue.
I study this theme by analyzing women’s motives to begin sexual relationship, private agreements between men and women, and men’s problems making an oath. The first subject consists women’s accusations how men had seduced them by marital promises and engagements. The second point of view is to study how men were forced to make a private maintenance agreement with women. The last subject is men’s problems to make an oath, which could have clear all accusations considering fatherhood and obligation to pay the maintenance.
Arja Turunen: Adoption of trousers into women's dress - study of dress as gendered bodily practice
The adoption of trousers was the most significant change in Western women’s dress in the 20th century. Traditional notions of gender difference and gender-specific clothing were challenged in the 1920s and 1930s, as trousers became fashionable apparel for the new, ‘modern’ woman, for trousers had been an exclusively male garment and a symbol of masculinity and male power at least since the Middle Ages. The adoption of trousers has been seen to symbolize the profound changes that were going on in women’s roles, behavior and position in society.
In my presentation I discuss the adoption of trousers into women’s dress as an example of the role dress has in ‘doing’ and performing gender. The presentation is based on my ongoing PhD -project on the adoption of trousers into women’s dress in Finland in 1920–1940s. The research material consists of advices given by Finnish women’s magazines of that period. In my study I follow Joanne Entwistle (2000, 2001) who sees dress as situated bodily practice, and by doing so, criticizes the approaches that see dress and fashion as abstract symbolic systems. The aim of my presentation is to take a new look at the adoption of trousers by analyzing the social and cultural context of the practices of dress of the period.
Jung-Tsung Yang: Folding Deleuze and Guattari: gender, fashion and ecology
In this paper, I want to address an intersection of gender, fashion and ecology through a reading of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s work. Feminists have been engaging with Deleuze and Guattari, this engagement is mainly about the concept of becoming-woman, affect and matter. Deleuze’s concept of fold, which is explored in his writing, The Fold, however, has not gained much attention. In attempting to clarify what is baroque, Deleuze’s concept of fold alludes to clothing and veiling without elaboration. Since 1970s Feminist attitude toward fashion has been ambivalent, on the one hand there has been much condemnation of fashion. On the other hand some feminists have begun to study fashion. Recently within these studies there is a new approach focusing on matter and embodiment, but this approach has not yet drawn from Deleuze’s concept of matter. In the fields of fashion theory, textile study and psychoanalysis, some researchers attempt to elaborate Deleuze’s concept of fold in terms of vision and fantasy. But I want to add two perspectives to these researches. First, drawing on art historian’s engagement with Walter Benjamin’s reading of velvet and domestic design, I want to argue that Deleuze’s concept of fold can be elaborate with Benjamin’s reading in order to lay out the relation between fold and touch and this relation’s effect on articulation of what is feminine. Second, I want to suggest that Guattari’s concept of ecology can be supplemented with recent discussion about the relation between fashion and ecology.
Last update 8.10.2009.
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