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Looking for Ph.D. students |
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Redaktor: Agnieszka Gajewska
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30.01.2010. |
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The Center for Gender and Diversity, Maastricht University, is looking for potential Ph.D. students who could write a proposal that fits the research project outlined below.
When interested, the student should contact Prof. Maaike Meijer (
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) as soon as possible, but no later then March 1, 2010.
For more information on the appliciation process, see http://www.fdcw.org/phdprogram/
Imagining (un)intelligible lives
Contact person: Prof. dr. Maaike Meijer
Supervising Team:
Prof. dr. Maaike Meijer
Dr. Aagje Swinnen
Drs. Roel van den Oever
We live in a world in which certain bodies and identities, certain lives and deaths, are partly unintelligible (the term is Judith Butler’s). They do not fully cohere, they do not make complete sense. Think of the infant born with an intersex condition that defies our binary gender system, of the aging celebrity who displays “age inappropriate” behavior by continuing to present herself as a lust object, of the illegal immigrant who is acknowledged (as a threat) and disavowed (as a citizen) at once.
Sometimes the unintelligible crosses over into intelligibility, that is, into social, political, and cultural legibility. Over the past four decades, lesbians and gay men have successfully organized and claimed equal rights, including the legal recognition of same-sex marriages. The country whose Constitution considered slaves as only 3/5 of a person in 1787 eventually abolished slavery in 1865, outlawed racial segregation with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and recently elected an African-American president. Change comes slowly, reluctantly, and incompletely, but it does come.
The struggle for emancipation is often in part performed by cultural artifacts, as epitomized by the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852). More recent examples are the documentary Paris Is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1990), portraying the African-American and Latino drag queen underground of New York City; the play Angels in America (Tony Kushner, 1992), about the gay community reinventing itself after the advent of the AIDS epidemic; the novel Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides, 2002), telling the coming-of-age story of an intersexed person; and the movie Calendar Girls (Nigel Cole, 2003), starring aging women as sexual beings. These texts not only record and imagine the bodies and lives of the to-be-intelligible, they also performatively constitute that cultural legibility.
A range of questions can be posed regarding these cultural artifacts: How do they simultaneously perform the tasks of discovering and emboldening the self, strengthening a nascent community, and gaining acceptance from a wider audience? How do they balance realities that are already being lived and imagined possibilities that have yet to materialize? In light of the focal point Cultural Memory and Diversity: How do they interact with other emancipation struggles and their cultural representations, by way of imitation, opposition, inscription, appropriation? How do they function within the communities that they have helped found, how are they remembered, recreated, redefined, and to what purposes?
We welcome proposals that aim to think through some of these issues in relation to in-depth interpretations of a number of cultural texts (in the broadest sense of the word) in which the unintelligible tentatively leaps into intelligibility.
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Zmieniony ( 30.01.2010. )
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