Women’s circles and the rise of the new feminine : reclaiming sisterhood, spirituality, and wellbeing

This paper draws on the results of ethnographic research on ‘women’s circles’; women-only spaces that celebrate sisterhood and the ‘feminine’, including the increasingly globally popular ‘Red Tent’. Women’s circles are non-institutionalized, often monthly gatherings, for women to come together and relax, meditate, share stories, partake in rituals, heal, nourish, and empower themselves. Based on fieldwork and in-depth interviews with founders and organizer-practitioners of women’s circles in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany, the study shows how they offer a growing number of women from diverse backgrounds a space that they find lacking in secular-liberal society, out of a desire to ‘re/connect’ with each other, their bodies, their inner selves, and sometimes with the sacred. Women’s circles are indicative of women’s heightened participation in the realm of subjective wellbeing culture, including both elements of spirituality and more secular ‘personal growth’. Against the presumption that circles would be merely expressive of neo-liberal individualist consumer culture or retrograde gender essentialism, the paper argues they can be viewed as sites of sisterhood, solidarity, and dissent, cultivating a new type of femininity grounded in both affirmative and more oppositional forms of emerging feminist consciousness. In response to the so-called ‘post-secular turn in feminism’ and the growing interest for religion and, more recently, spirituality in (secular) feminist theory, the paper pleads for a re-consideration of the rise of women’s spirituality/wellbeing culture in the West as a form of post-secular agency

Researching gender: the challenge of global diversity today

The text of this paper is based on a lecture given at the symposium of the Ghent African Platform “Researching Gender in/on Africa” at Ghent University in December 2009. It addresses some general challenges faced by ‘gender studies’ as an autonomous field versus ‘gender research’ as an integrated topic within mainstream disciplines in academia. Gender studies have sometimes superseded ‘women’s studies’ and expanded to cover the terrain of study of various forms of diversity including men’s and transgender studies. We will show that the ‘mainstreaming’ of gender in public policy at local, national and transnational levels is a development which may potentially lead to the loss of a – feminist – political edge. Secondly, while gender studies with their emphasis on socially constructed gender as opposed to biological essentialist understandings of ‘sex’ appear to face the challenge of a popular ‘new biological determinism’, it is shown that the binary model of sex/gender in fact has been criticised for some time now from within feminist theory and gender research. This is (selectively) illustrated with research from four disciplines, including the work of African gender studies scholars, i.e. feminist philosophy, social sciences (in particularsocio-cultural anthropology), history and biology itself. This then shows how the accusation that gender studies would be ‘socially deterministic’ without attending to bodily matters or materiality is unfounded. Finally, it is argued that there is still a need for gender studies to become more culturally diverse, more global and transnational in its outlook, by becoming more deeply attuned to the way gender intersects with other forms of difference and taking into account postcolonial critiques of western feminist paternalism, without falling into the trap of cultural relativism

Precision Supersymmetry Measurements at the e^-e^- Collider

Measurements of supersymmetric particle couplings provide important verification of supersymmetry. If some of the superpartners are at the multi-TeV scale, they will escape direct detection at planned future colliders. However, such particles induce nondecoupling corrections in processes involving the accessible superparticles through violations of the supersymmetric equivalence between gauge boson and gaugino couplings. These violations are analogous to the oblique corrections in the electroweak sector of the standard model, and can be parametrized in terms of super-oblique parameters. The $e^- e^-$ collision mode of a future linear collider is shown to be an excellent environment for such high precision measurements of these SUSY parameters, which will provide an important probe of superparticles beyond reachable energies.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, LaTeX, Talk presented at the 2nd International Workshop on Electron-Electron Interactions at TeV Energies, September 22-24, 1997, University of California, Santa Cru

Endomorphism algebras of QM abelian surfaces

We determine endomorphism algebras of abelian surfaces with quaternion multiplication.Comment: 14 pages. Lemma 2.10 correcte