Wayward academia—Wild, Connected, and Solitary Diffractions in Everyday Praxis

In this article, I study the everyday conduct of pedagogies in the wild in contemporary academia by means of an analysis of modes of attention in random “thicker ‘moments’of spacetimemattering” (Barad, 2014, p. 169). These modes are discussed with the help of the notion of diffraction. I identify three modes of attention—the solitary, the connected, and the wild—that manifest themselves mainly as tensions between several modes. The study leads me to suggest that critical feminist scholarship explicitly aiming to disrupt and trouble normative academia often reproduces competitive, nervous practices, linear onto-epistemologies, and the commodification of both scholars and scholarship. These scholarly practices occur among students and supervisors alike, often in the name of necessity and even survival. Yet, despite the anxiety-inducing aspects of contemporary academia, diffractive moments have a powerful presence, too. In such moments, a wild and responsible otherwise is imagined and diffracted

HIV Politics and Structural Violence : Access to Treatment and Knowledge

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The Girl and the Feminist State? : Subjectification Projects in the Nordic Welfare State

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The Naked, Vulnerable, Crazy Girl

In this article I explore the concept of the rebellious girl by examining the cases of three different girls: an HIV activist in South Africa; a young feminist in Finland; and a topless on-line protester in post-revolution Tunisia. Although their contexts and messages vary greatly, there are marked similarities between and amongst them. I suggest that, in general, the media, political movements, and research agendas often appear to have difficulty taking girls’ protests seriously. The rebellious girl is ridiculed, shunned, shamed, and disciplined. The protests explored here can, however, be read as important visual interruptions that attempt to invoke an epistemic mutiny that does not beg for inclusion on preexisting terms but, rather, challenges the boundaries of acceptable bodily integrity. They also gesture towards the social in a way that demands recognition, acceptance, and support, not a simplified acceptance based on the notion of neoliberal individual freedom.Peer reviewe

A Feminist Struggle? South African HIV Activism as Feminist Politics

This paper is a feminist reading of HIV activism in South Africa, of a social movement that does not describe itself as a women’s movement: it advocates both women’s and men’s, trans, hetero- and homosexual peoples’ rights for adequate health care and antiretroviral medication. Like many others, Chandra Talpade Mohanty suggests that today’s powerful feminism is found in anti-globalization movements that do not necessarily call themselves feminist. These critiques maintain that the theory, critique and activism of grass-root women across the globe, for example around anti-globalization, should also inform academic feminist discussions. This article studies discourses on HIV in Africa by contrasting the politics of the Treatment Action Campaign, a South African activist movement, with social science research literature on HIV in Africa. The contextual and political dimension of the illness is a central feature in activist discourses, a feature that can be described as inherently feminist. The representations of HIV/AIDS in Africa and the policies these imply are strikingly different in the activist and academic discourses. We argue that activists’ political orientation and the consequent anti-individualism are key dividing features that lead the activist and research discourses down divergent paths. In contrast, HIV research inhabits a de-politicized and individualizing tendency

Unlearning a commitment to the “we” in a transnational feminist classroom

This chapter discusses pedagogical approaches to Julia's confusion and the lure of the "we". The paradox of learning and unlearning; absorbing and deconstructing leaves room for the university to weigh its criteria so that only some students easily pass as the precisely suitable ones, the ones with a perfect balance between qualities. Exposing "West" as a political commitment to a certain version of global capitalism may act as "demystificatory criticism". The multicultural, transnational class with students from a rich variety of backgrounds, albeit mainly European yet also globally diverse, is not an element against a homogenizing "we". When a longer legacy of feminist thinking is needed an appropriate framing of older texts, explaining why certain discussions were essential in different points of time, is useful. The "we" was constructed around a few discursive tropes, often through dichotomous juxtapositions. The low score is compensated by his current education, indicating that his privilege is not a stable position depending on background.Peer reviewe

Making sense of the body

Aineisto on Opiskelijakirjaston digitoimaa ja Opiskelijakirjasto vastaa aineiston käyttöluvist

Beyond Agency and Victimization : Re-reading Women’s Embodied Experiences.

We explore a range of projections that, we argue, are increasingly characterising much applied research on and popular representations of HIV/AIDS, gender and embodiment in Africa. Showing how the image of the victim is being challenged by a growing emphasis on agency, we identify continuities between these approaches. It is argued that both the insistence on victimisation and the celebration of agency naturalise neo-liberal ideas about the autonomous individual. Our paper reflects on our work on the South African Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), focusing on how we have confronted issues such as research design, reflexivity, methodology and ethics. We also show how TAC activists have redefined entrenched ideas about agency and victimisation. In developing a language and politics of activism that radically unsettles conventional understandings of embodied acts in the context of the HIV epidemic, TAC raises challenges for research, writing and media representations of embodiment and social marginalisation in African contexts.Peer reviewe

Häpeä, arki ja ruumiillisuus

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Haastattelu : kokemuksia, kohtaamisia, kerrontaa

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