Tema Genus Higher Seminar

Mini Symposium: CHALLENGING RECENT TRENDS IN

WHITE/WESTERN FEMINISMS
This mini-symposium will address the ways that some of the fashionable trends of
white/western feminist theory and its epistemic privilege.

JANUARY 25th, 13.15 to 16.00 Room: Faros

SABINE BROECK, University of Bremen –"The Human and its Post: Continuities of Anti-Blackness"
In response to ongoing Black feminist challenges to gender studies, and to gender theory, the
paper will address the continuities of Black abjection in (post)feminist philosophies of the
human, as well as of the posthuman. In particular, it will look at Rosi Braidotti's work to discuss
its white agnotological premises. Her posthumanist approach dismisses the critical relevance of
enslavism (slavery and its "afterlife", as Saidiya Hartman has called it) for a theoretical analysis
of the late postmodern moment.

ROSALBA ICAZA, University of Amsterdam Diversity Commission –"Decolonial Feminisms and

Global Politics"
Decolonial thinking has recently been partaking in the current wave of academic interest
focused on critically understanding the epistemic foundations of International Relations and
Global Politics as disciplines responsible of thinking how power operates in the international and
global spheres. This talk will address the centrality of border thinking in re-thinking the
'international' and in understanding what happens when in the process of that critical rethinking
the self-ascribed privileges of the West knowing subject are laid bare.

MADINA TLOSTANOVA, Linköping University – “Postsocialist Feminism as a Missing Voice”

After the collapse of the socialist system the voices and perspectives of feminists coming from
the former “second world” have largely remained unheard, neglected or appropriated by the
Western feminisms presented as universal or normative. At the same time the postsocialist
feminism has not been accepted into the company of non-Western and women of color gender
studies and activism. I will address some of the major reasons and consequences of this
unfortunate configuration, as well as the possible ways out of the postsocialist feminist void.