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Psychical dynamics of resentment : the example of the S.T.O. (forced labour) during WWII



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Psychical dynamics of resentment : the example of the S.T.O. (forced labour) during WWII

Bérangère Pautrat, University Toulouse Jean-Jaurès - berangere.chambon@wanadoo.fr


The period of compulsory work during the first world war is little known by the public today. After the defeat of France in June 1940, and after Marshal Pétain was granted full powers, he - with the help of his government - implemented a collaboration policy with the German occupying forces .
During the years 1942, 1943, 1944, the Vichy government would vote three laws by decree setting up Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO) - that would apply to the majority of the French population during the years when Marshal Pétain was in office.
The exploitation of the work force by the Nazis was a phenomenon that spread to the whole of Europe, but, in France, 650 000 young people - mostly born in 1920, 1921, 1922 - were exiled to Germany and forced to work by the Nazis in the German factories.
At first, this population was considered as deported, some even use the phrase deportation for work, but since 1945, they have been suspected of leaving voluntarily and this would last for over sixty years. There has been a long judicial battle over the title of « deported person for work » and the conscripts have suffered from violent accusations for a long time.
Between 1980 and 1990, several courts refuse to condemn the title of « deported person for work », but in 1992, the judgement made by the final Court of Appeal was without appeal, and it obliged the National Federation to give up this title - « Le DT » - for the term - le « PROSCRIT ».
This long quarrel about the title has continued to have a great impact on this group who felt excluded and abandoned by the public authorities and it was in a climate of general indifference that in 2008, a decree made the phrase « the victims of forced work in Nazi Germany» official, any notion of deportation being eliminated and forbidden from then on.
The resentment felt by the individual or the social group always originates from an open wound, an act of violence, a trauma or an insult. Among the French conscripts I interviewed in the context of my university research that did not originally focus on this aspect of forced work, I became aware that the memory of this long judicial battle was opening old wounds.


The Care in prison in New-Caledonia : why take culture into account

Orane Hmana, University Toulouse Jean-Jaurès - orane.hmana@yahoo.fr


The goal of this presentation is to provide an insight on the situation of detainees in the “Camps-Est “ detention center, located in Nouméa, New-Caledonia.
The French Law of 18 January 1994 requires that detainees get a quality and continuity care equivalent to those offered to the general population . But in fact, in the prison to have access to the care/health system is very difficult.
As for New Caledonia, where 90% of the population in prisons belongs to the Kanak community ( Kanak are indigenous to New-Caledonia), it is necessary to avoid a European oriented perspective but to implement intercultural care protocols where the “subject detainee” would be an actor.
In fact, when Western doctors are in front of Pacific people the problem of difference of cultures arises in the medical treatment of detainees. It is important to place the detainees at the center of care device because although most pathologies are characterized by clinical presentations from Western countries. Nevertheless the meanings attributed to them are different from one culture to another .
I propose to explain the grounded research I realized. In April 2014, for my doctoral research, I worked in Camps-Est and I conducted interviews with Kanak detainees who had risk behavior.
This grounded research considers the status of culture with respect to medical and psychological care provided to Kanak prisoners.

Migration: between resistance and compromise

Clementine Resve, University of Lorraine - clem.resve@gmail.com


The aim of our communication is to first understand how the migration of students contributes to a (re)construction of gender identity and how this migration is a strategy of resistance against the global hegemonic Western masculinity model. We will discuss those subjects in the context of French colonization and more precisely within the Kanak people. This communication is based on a comparative study about students’ genders. Our population is located in Toulouse, where Kanak community is settled.
Ten semi-structured interviews have been conducted: five males and five females, all of them were Kanak students newly arrived from the Lifou Island (New Caledonia / Kanaky). We made some observations and asked the interviewers about their vision of the “Coloniality of Gender” and their life under colonialism. It has been shown that the roles of migration, education and qualification impact the (re)construction of masculinity and the reestablishment of the masculine domination through jobs and businesses of power back in New Caledonia/ Kanaky. Our results highlight how students’ migration joins the struggle against the hegemonic Western masculinity and for the independence. This student's’ migration may represent a process of resistance against colonialists’ roles of power. Our findings could explain how the economic and cultural forces of globalization influence the (re)construction of kanak's masculinity and gender roles in this region. The inquiry shows that to resist the imposition of colonialism power they have to compromise with the Western model.


10. FEMINIST TURNING POINTS
Stream organisers: Katie Cruz (University of Bristol) Yvette Russell (University of Bristol)
This stream invites papers to engage with the theme of turning points in legal, political and economic spheres of life and feminist theory. It is particularly interested in creating a space for a discussion about heightened precarity and neoliberal hegemony and the response of feminist theorists and activists. For some, the present necessitates a return to theoretical traditions rendered suspect, including Socialist and Marxist feminisms. Others, fatigued by poststructuralist analysis, claim that we can only understand the present by turning our attention towards ‘New Materialisms’. Others still insist that we critique feminist engagement with the neoliberal state through the lens of so-called ‘governance feminism’. The stream is envisaged as a space for feminist discussion, theorising, planning, and debate.

Panel 1

Chair: Yvette Russell


Mobilisation, problem representation and silencing – paradoxes in Swedish policy around stereotypes, gender equality and free speech.

Eva-Maria Svensson, University of Gothenburg - eva-maria.svensson@law.gu.se

Maria Edström, University of Gothenburg
Gender equality and freedom of expression are two core values. The purpose of this paper is to analyse policy processes in Sweden when the values are in conflict, and why freedom of expression tend to weigh heavier than gender equality. The starting-point is the ratification and the implementation of CEDAW in Sweden, where the core values are explicitly branded as hallmarks, with a focus on policy processes around article 5a, concerning the elimination of gender stereotypes. The issue is of specific interest in Sweden when it comes to legislation against sex and gender discriminatory advertising, a topic of concern for the women’s movement since the 1970s. Despite repeated government inquiries proposing legislation against this type of advertising, the perception of the impossibility to legislate due to it being a threat against freedom of expression is still persistent. The policy processes (including legislative processes) are analysed with help of theories on policy processes, and the concepts mobilisation, problem representation and silencing (Bacchi). Which actors have been active in the implementation of CEDAW’s article 5a? How has article 5a been framed? Which aspects of the article have been debated and which have been silenced? We have earlier stated that the core values are understood as colliding and freedom of expression is considered the most important (Svensson & Edström 2014). In this paper we address why Sweden has this position, a country known for its governance feminism. We see mainly two explanations, the long Swedish tradition of freedom of expression compared to the more recent tradition of gender equality, in combination with an increasing importance and emphasis on the value of the freedom to conduct a business, the core value and a fundamental right of the market economy. With the help of Wendy Brown’s theory the latter explanation will be explored.

Criminalising violence against women: feminism, penality and rights-based discourses in post-neoliberal Ecuador

Silvana Tapia Tapia, University of Kent - sct25@kent.ac.uk


Contemporary penality has been linked to the decline of the welfare state and the rise of neoliberal discourses which emphasise individual responsibility, sidelining social redistribution (Garland, 2012; Simon, 1998). A sector of feminist scholarship has analysed the role of “governance feminism” in expanding carcerality through campaigns for harsher penal laws, particularly in trafficking, prostitution, and wartime rape (Bernstein, 2007; Bernstein, 2012; Halley, Kotiswaran, Shamir, & Thomas, 2006; Halley, 2008). “Carceral feminism” is said to stem from a structuralist understanding of gender violence as sexual domination which overshadows concerns with social inequality. However, Ecuador and other Latin American countries have undergone processes of political and legal reform which are generally regarded as redistributive and averse to neoliberalism (Grugel & Riggirozzi, 2012; Ospina, 2009; Radcliffe, 2012). Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution has been framed as both post-neoliberal and decolonial. This has not stopped penality from thriving; instead, some analyses show that incarceration is on the rise (Sozzo, 2015). Likewise, the Penal Code of 2014 created new criminal offences, including forms of violence against women whose criminalisation was promoted by many feminists. These paradoxes demand further examination of the conditions that allow penality to thrive in allegedly post-neoliberal scenarios and how feminist campaigns relate to penality in non-Anglo-American contexts. “Governance feminism” is not always useful to look at transforming sites where feminists are only able to negotiate legal reform sporadically. Based on fieldwork carried out in Ecuador, this paper argues that penalisation has come to be conflated with the protection of women’s rights, and that such association, which is a constant amongst feminist networks, has not been interrogated but rather reaffirmed through Ecuador’s post-neoliberal turn. This shows the complexity of “apolitical” rights-based discourses as fields of intelligibility that channel emancipatory demands, often acquiring a penal orientation even outside neoliberal agendas or deliberately carceral projects.

Gay Governance: A Queer Critique

Aeyal Gross, Tel-Aviv University - aeyal.gross@gmail.com


In 2009 the US Congress passed a statute that expanded the federal hate crime law to include crimes motivated by the victim’s gender, sexual orientation or gender identity. While this was heralded as a victory for LGBT rights, some queer groups expressed reservation to this legislation, arguing that the harsher prison sentences accorded to hate crimes, mean that the statute will increase the power of the prison system, in which trans people, people of color and poor people, are disproportionally incarcerated. Hate crime legislation may be seen as a version of “gay governance” in this case criticized by queer activists. But it is not the only example. The involvement of the Israeli government and Tel Aviv municipality in gay pride and in a gay tourism campaign, were described by many as “pinkwashing” – the use of gay rights as propaganda for Israel, aimed at diverting attention from the occupation of the Palestinians. In 2013, after the legislation for same sex marriage passed in the UK, Prime Minister Cameron said he wanted to export gay marriage around the world as part of the “global race” where the UK should export more and sell more. But in recent years it has been argued that the growing legislation and violence against homosexuality in Africa, is partly a backlash to the sights of same sex marriage being recognized in various countries and the fear of such demands being made locally, not to mention exported globally. These stories point to the complexity of what happens when homosexuality shifts from being a phenomenon persecuted or at least marginalized by states, to one that is incorporated into the state or the municipality. Can we than talk of “gay governance”? What can the queer critique offer? This paper will examine these questions and consider how gay governance is similar to “governance feminism”.

Panel 2

Chair: Sarah Keenan


Governance Feminism’ and the Neoliberal Academy

Katie Cruz, University of Bristol - Katie.a.cruz@gmail.com

Yvette Russell, University of Bristol - yvette.russell@bristol.ac.uk
Which state legislatures are under feminist control? How many public universities have a noticeably pro-feminist leadership and agenda, and which ones are they? And are they hiring?’6
This paper seeks to subject the claims of the critics of so-called ‘governance feminism’ (CGF) to the same critical scrutiny they purport to subject feminist scholarship. First, it traces a link between the market-based logic of the neoliberal university and the take up of CGF studies. CGF scholars seek to both generate a ‘entirely new framework of thought’ through which to characterize the research and activism of feminist scholars, but they do this primarily by reference to tools and methods characteristic of neoliberalism. It argues that paradoxically, given its supposed aims, CGF scholarship is itself underpinned by neoliberal rationality. Second, this paper traces how CGF scholars’ call for a more ‘materialist’ feminist approach in research and activism is de-linked from the rich history and present of materialist, including Socialist, Marxist and political economy, feminisms. These feminisms, however, are mischaracterized, reduced and idealized in the CFG narrative. It concludes with a call for feminist scholars to continue to oppose rather than capitulate to the demands and rationale of the neoliberal academy and for continued intellectual honesty and critical rigour in our social justice projects.

International Criminal Law, Gender and Governance Feminism: An Examination of Halley’s ‘Rape at Rome’ 

Valerie Oosterveld, University of Western Ontario - vooster@uwo.ca


In 2009, Janet Halley published ‘Rape at Rome: Feminist Interventions in the Criminalization of Sex-Related Violence in Positive Criminal Law’. In this article, she posited that the changes in international humanitarian and criminal law implemented in the 1990s in relation to gender issues were the result of an evolving, but relatively unified, feminist universalism centered around the conception of a global war against women. She raises a number of concerns about what this means for feminist understandings of conflict and justice, including the exclusion of violations against men. In my paper, I will argue that the reality behind the story outlined by Halley was more complex, more nuanced and less universalist (and structuralist) than she describes. I do so as a feminist scholar working in the field of international criminal law, and also as an individual deeply involved in the specific processes critiqued by Halley. I will question Halley’s ‘feminist universalism’ categorization through two examples: the categorization of sexual and gender-based crimes in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and the negotiation of the victim-centered procedural provisions in that Statute. That said, certain of Halley’s concerns do resonate, including those related to unintended consequences. I will use the example of Canada’s importation of the Rome Statute’s rape provisions into its Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act in 2000. This adoption is potentially at odds with successful feminist efforts of the 1980s to remove the legal term ‘rape’ from the Criminal Code in favour of the broader category of ‘sexual assault’. I will end by comparing Halley’s concerns with the application of the gender-focused provisions of the Rome Statute to date.

Medea and the Tragedy of the Stranger: Feminist turning points

Nayeli Urquiza, University of Kent - nayeli.urquiza@gmail.com


This paper fleshes out the turning point where feminist notions of justice were rendered unintelligible and impossible to include within law, represented by the effacement of the goddess Metis in Greek mythology, which is also the event out of which Athena was born. According to the myth, the Metis was swallowed by Zeus, who felt threatened by her power and that of her unborn child (Athena). Metis died in Zeus’ mind while Athena was born from Zeus’ head; however, the Metis lives obliquely in the myth of Medea. In this paper, I propose reading the tragedy of Medea as an allegory of the effects arising out of the estrangement of the feminine in ancient thought, represented by the Metis, that reverberates in legal theory today. Said otherwise, in the face of dispossession and exile, Medea’s mourning allegorizes the exclusions of a specific feminine justice. Through a rejoinder between Adriana Cavarero’s vocal philosophy and Judith Butler’s performative approach to vulnerability, I will explain how Medea’s mourning is not simply unintelligible rage and grief. Instead, her lamentation is directed at the hostile hospitality of the law towards femininity, best represented by the social orderings that endow masculine legal subjects with specific attributes highly valued in liberal legal tradition, such as the ability to own property or to be heard only when one speaks clearly through reason.

Panel 3

Chair: Katie Cruz


Sex/Gender is Fluid: What Now For Feminist Engagements with International Human Rights?

Kathryn Mcneilly, Queen’s University Belfast - k.mcneilly@qub.ac.uk


During the 1980s and 1990s much feminist activism and scholarship worked hard to insist that ‘Women’s Rights Are Human Rights’ and challenge the earlier masculinist logic underpinning rights. This work marked a significant turning point in relation to feminist engagement with the discourse and practice of human rights. However, towards the end of the ‘Women’s Rights Are Human Rights’ era an equally important turning point took place in feminist and queer theorising more generally; the deconstruction of sex/gender and of the binary of male/female and asymmetry of male>female within heteronormativity. This troubling of sex/gender has indeed stimulated a critical reassessment of the ‘Women’s Rights Are Human Rights’ campaign, critiquing how such feminist work served to unconsciously reinforce binarised and asymmetrical sex. How can feminist work on rights proceed after this critique? It has been suggested that sex/gender be foregrounded as fluid and non-binarised and coalitional work between feminists and queer activists be undertaken in order to work towards engagements with human rights which more effectively respond to the myriad of ways of living and being sexed/gendered. In this paper I assert that it is not possible to continue the feminist project on human rights by changing our conception of gender alone. Rather, the way in which feminist work perceives human rights, their underpinnings and their potential usages must change too. A critical and queer understanding of gender must be accompanied by a critical and queer understanding of rights beyond liberalism which fundamentally grasps human rights as also fluid, non-binarised and unfinished. This possibility is demonstrated via the concept of a right to gender flourishing which I outline as one way of troubling both gender and rights in feminist work.

On Gender and Justice: Interrogating Equality, Difference and Discrimination

Marjo Rantala, University of Helsinki - marjo.rantala@helsinki.fi

Tiia Sudenkaarn, University of Turku - tiijun@utu.fi
Gender and gender difference are critically present, actively configured and reconfigured in legal discourses. Feminist philosophy of law has commendably discussed gender difference between women and men, crucially revealing how her jurisprudential position is often detrimentally different from his. This seemingly unproblematic male-female dichotomy per se, however, remains uninterrupted. Its effects grossly exceed debates on e.g. salary equality or childcare arrangements (even though important on their own right). Most brutally, this dichotomy is forced upon whose very embodiment is non-compliant to it, such as intersex people who are subjected to severe body mutilation as infants for mandatory sex affirmation, or trans people stipulated by law to undergo sterilization. Both of these practices are currently enforced in Finland, a Nordic welfare state with a progressive human rights agenda. From our viewpoint combing feminist metaphysics and moral theory with Gender and Law work on anti-discrimination jurisprudence, we urge the concept of gender discrimination to be revised and expanded. We argue that among others currently excluded issues, several of trans and intersex practices should be perceived as gender discrimination. Anti-discrimination legislation established in Finland, in the European Union and by the European Court of Human Rights builds upon the Aristotelian tradition that justice is served when those deemed similar based on shared qualities are treated equal; when like cases are treated as like. In terms of gender, who should be similar to whom; to what notion of gender should the courts compare trans and intersex? What is cisgender? Is cisgender a necessary condition for equality and justice? How does ’raw’ or ’just’ gender relate to norms and normativity? How to facilitate this approach with intersectionalism, acknowledging several causes and effects of discrimination simultaneously? How to achieve justice sensitive to difference without eradicating equality? We suggest redefining justice and other key concepts in the tradition of feminist metaphysics and moral theory.

The legal recognition of same-sex couples as a political demand: Biopolitical classifications and the aporia of the “married” subject

Athina Papanagiotou, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences - papanagiotouath@gmail.com


Legal recognition of same-sex couples forms one of the most topical questions internationally for LGBTQI+ movements and the relative theory. Legal recognition consists, for a part of the movement, in a political, emancipatory claim which seeks to ensure a safe legal ground, where the partners will enjoy visibility and rights comparable to those provided to heterosexual married couples. However, the historicization of partnership recognition, and more specifically of the institution of marriage, emerges its links to exclusion and the biopolitical classification of desire and pleasure. My study indicates the aporetic tensions between the political demand of recognition -as a radical one- and the context (historical, political and social) that matters the institution of marriage. Which subject is re-produced under a legal institution of recognized partnership and what story about partnership does the institution tell? In other words, how does legal recognition form the “married” subject and which are the consequences and the abjects of this formation? From this position, I will question the potentiality of institutions such as the civil partnership to unsettle gendered binaries or/and reproduce exclusions, by signifying specific gender, sexual and relational expressions as imaginable or unimaginable. The study will not attempt to respond to the dilemmatic question "for or against" the legal recognition, but to complicate it in terms of a Derridean aporia of justice. The questioning could become a point of reflection on understanding law, not “simply” as the juridical class of state power, but also as an effective apparatus of subjectification or/and a potential tool of making emancipatory claims.

Panel 4

Chair: TBC



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