The Department offers majors in Cultural Studies and Gender Studies which can be taken at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Our staff have an outstanding research record spanning a range of fields.
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- Plats:
- Camperdown campus, 2006
- telefon:
- +61 2 9351 2222
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GaM event #1 Remembering Eve SedgwickSkapades för ungefär 3 månader sedan
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- GCS Seminar - Professor Anna Y...
New Law School Annexe Room 442
den 16 oktober kl. 14:00 - Clinical Labour – Gendered Tra...
Refectory, H113 University of Sydney
den 25 september kl. 14:00 - Class and gender in the margin...
New Law School Annexe, Seminar Room...
den 11 september kl. 14:00 - Sarah Ahmed, "Killing Joy: Fem...
Oriental Room, S204
den 8 september kl. 17:00 - Remembering Eve Sedgwick
New Law School Seminar Room 442, Un...
den 28 augusti kl. 14:00
Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney
Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney
The rapidly expanding field of life sciences research is increasingly dominated by global commercial interests. The OECD has identified life sciences research as the next wave of innovation driving large sectors of the global knowledge economy (OECD 2006). However, if a viable medical bioeconomy is to be built, medical... researchers require proprietary control of high volumes of human tissue, and access to a growing number of research subjects to test new drugs and treatments. Since the late 1990s the leading bioeconomies – the USA, Britain, parts of Scandinavia, and increasingly nations in South and East Asia – India, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore – have seen a rapid expansion in demand for both reproductive and research embryos and oöcytes, cord blood for stem cell research, and blood donation for large scale DNA databases, including national biobanks.
While Odonors’ subjects are essential productive agents in this burgeoning bioeconomic activity, their contribution is nevertheless understood in property law, bioethics, and government regulation as part of a national gift economy, a form of voluntarism and a function of participatory citizenship. This framework persists, despite widespread recognition of the essentially commercial nature of much biomedical research and the increasingly transactional nature of tissue Odonation.’ In this paper, we propose the concept of Oclinical labour’ as an alternative way of theorizing the contemporary economies of tissue exchange and their contractual forms.
We will focus on the development of global markets for both reproductive and research oöcytes, in which generally poor oöcytes vendors sell their tissues to brokers and IVF clinics. While the USA has a high cost oöcyte market, where college educated women can sell oöcytes for considerable sums (although at some risk), reproductive brokerage companies increasingly recruit from less expensive vendors, an exemplary case of global labor arbitrage (crossing borders to recruit lower wage workers). Brokerage companies effectively mediate between wealthy and poor populations that share a racial phenotype and often a national border – notably Eastern/Western Europe and South Korea/Japan.
In our attempt to theorize these economies, we revisit and problematize the materialist feminist tradition of thinking around 'reproductive labour’, political economies of Osexual labour’ (Kempadoo; Truong; Bernstein) and more recent theories of post-fordist labour. We contend that contemporary economies of feminized, clinical labour problematize the very meaning of 'reproduction’ assumed by the materialist tradition. We also argue that a major difference between Fordist uncompensated reproductive labour and the contemporary relations of reproduction is a denationalisation of the reproductive sphere and its exposure to global precarious labour markets. Modes of tissue exchange that were once regulated within an economy of the gift are now increasingly subject to more or less immediate forms of commodification and informal labour relations, while the national citizenship model of blood and tissue donation is undercut by emerging transnational circuits of tissue exchange. These circuits are often closely aligned with the geographies of labour migration that characterize more familiar forms of informal service labour such as prostitution, cleaning and childcare. We analyse oöcyte vending as precarious female labor in the lower echelons of the global bioeconomy, and compare it to other forms of racialized female labor, particularly sex work.
About the speakers:
Melinda Cooper is lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. She is author of Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (2008). She is currently working on a book manuscript, co-authored with Catherine Waldby, called Clinical Labour – Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy.’
Associate Professor Catherine Waldby is International Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Sydney University. She researches and publishes in social studies of biomedicine and the life sciences. Her books include AIDS and the Body Politic: Biomedicine and Sexual Difference (1996 Routledge), The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine (2000 Routledge),Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (with Robert Mitchell, Duke University Press 2006) and The Global Politics of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Science: Regenerative Medicine in Transition, (with Herbert Gottweis and Brian Salter, Palgrave 2009). She has received national and international research grants for her work on embryonic stem cells, blood donation and biobanking.
Department of Gender and Cultural Studies Research Seminar
Tid:den 25 september 2009 14:00
Plats:Refectory, H113 University of Sydney
Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney
The Pains of Precarious Labour: Work, Identity and Narratives of Aspiration in the 'New Economy'
George Morgan (UWS)
Paid work is becoming increasingly precarious as young people face the prospect of working lives fragmented by the effects of technological change, economic restructuring and the erosion of industrial righ...ts. In this context, workers are being told to take control of their working lives, to embrace the condition of vocational restlessness, become entrepreneurial and opportunistic rather than always seeking occupational stability. The prophets of the new economy reify qualities
like flexibility, creativity and reflexivity and encourage the development of ambition without fixed direction or goal. This paper will explore the corrosive effects of precariousness. Drawing on personal narrative interview data, it will argue that the challenges of the new economy are less likely to be embraced by those from disadvantaged backgrounds than by the middle class. This is partly for economic reasons but also because they are less inclined to view their skills and experiences in abstract/ transferable terms or to believe that, amdist the churning uncertainties of working life, they are acquiring any sense of agency or vocational momentum.
George Morgan is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Western Sydney. He is conducting a project under an ARC Discovery Grant entitled: The Just-in-Time Self: Young Men, Skill and Narratives of Aspiration in the New Economy. His books include Unsettled Places: Aboriginal People and Urbanisation in New South Wales (Wakefield Press, 2006) Outrageous! Moral Panics in Australia (ACYS Press, 2007) - the latter co-edited with Scott Poynting.
“The guys in there just expect to be laid”: Place, drinking cultures and young women
Gordon Waitt, Loretta Jesspon and Andrew Gorman-Murray (Wollongong)
This paper extends a growing research agenda on drinking cultures in pubs/clubs drawing on materials derived from a mixed methods approach deployed with young, white, single Australian women in Wollongong, Australia. The concept of the spatially-situated subjectivity is deployed to examine drinking cultures as the outcome of embodied and gendered socio-spatial practices. Drawing on narrative analysis our research suggests the paradoxical qualities for women ‘going out on the town’. Where and why women drink is argued to be an outcome of the negotiations, transgressions and accommodations as they reconcile a sense of self within the gendered and heterosexed socio-spatial practice of particular pubs. In practical terms, this means that research into drinking cultures needs to learn from the lived and embodied experience of drinking in particular places in order to provide effective advice for ameliorating risks of regular intoxication.
Gordon Waitt, Associate Professor of geography, University of Wollongong, studies the spatial dynamics of social inequalities. He is a specialist in geographies of sexuality, gender and tourism.
Department of Gender and Cultural Studies Research Seminar
Tid:den 11 september 2009 14:00
Plats:New Law School Annexe, Seminar Room 442
Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney
Sarah Ahmed, Professor in Race and Cultural Studies
Goldsmiths, University of London
"Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness"
This paper offers a feminist critique of happiness. It proceeds by suspending belief that happiness is a good thing, or that happiness is what we want, as beliefs that are central to th...e intellectual history of happiness. The paper suggests that feminist histories might offer an alternative history of happiness. It shows how happiness is what makes some things into goods (happy objects are those that are anticipated to cause happiness), and introduces the concept of "conditional happiness," when one person¹s happiness is made conditional upon another's, to explore how, for some, happiness means following other people¹s goods. The paper considers feminist consciousness as a consciousness of unhappiness, of what is lost or is given up by following the paths of happiness. Such consciousness does not necessarily involve a form of self-consciousness but a worldly consciousness in which unhappiness disturbs the familiar. The paper reflects specifically on Black feminist consciousness as a consciousness of what does not get noticed when happiness provides a horizon of experience.
presented by the SOPHI Gender and Modernity Research Group
Tid:den 8 september 2009 17:00
Plats:Oriental Room, S204
Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney
A half-day symposium
featuring
Melissa Hardie
Anna Gibbs
Elizabeth Stephens
Elizabeth McMahon
Chair: Melissa Gregg
Supported by The Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at The University of Sydney, The SOPHI Gender and Modernity Group, and the ARC Cultural Research Network.
Cultural theories of identity and subjectivity i...n the Humanities have been significantly influenced by critiques of binaristic thought, including those pioneered in Eve Sedgwick's writing. This legacy provides the foundation for the work of a number of feminist and queer scholars featured in this workshop, which aims to reflect on Sedgwick’s intellectual contribution in the wake of her death in April 2009.
Despite the amount of cultural research now exploring issues of identity relating to gender, sexuality and the body—and the institutional contexts of women's and gender studies departments in the academy today—young researchers are somewhat historically distant from the material and political conditions informing these theoretical interventions of previous decades. Additionally, young scholars pursuing these topics beyond major capital cities generally miss out on discussions with a critical mass of scholars with expertise and international interdisciplinary experience in the area. This seminar offers a valuable opportunity for an extended discussion of queer identity and scholarship for researchers in a range of fields.
The afternoon session, from 2-5pm, will be a seminar featuring guests from a range of universities. Dr Melissa Hardie (USyd) will present a feature discussion paper, the "Extinction of the Closet", analysing Sedgwick's _Epistemology of the Closet_ and its subsequent impact. This will be followed by a series of shorter reflections from a range of invited scholars: Associate Professor Anna Gibbs (UWS), Dr Elizabeth McMahon (UNSW) and Dr Elizabeth Stephens (UQ). These will examine the different strands of Sedgwick's thought, including personal reflections on the trajectory of queer theory and its prospects during the past decade.
The beginnings, present and future of queer theory
Tid:den 28 augusti 2009 14:00
Plats:New Law School Seminar Room 442, University of Sydney
