FEMCORUS mid-term symposium draws attention to the current debates on media’s role in shaping and popularizing contemporary feminisms ranging from celebrity feminism to neo-liberal and post-feminism (Rottenberg et al 2020). It underscores the role of popular culture and media as sites of feminism and (subversive) feminist struggle. The symposium acknowledges the intrinsic plurality of the ways in which feminism can be practiced and theorized in the 21st century within digital media and in various socio-political contexts. Importantly, it seeks to contribute to the scholarship which challenges the West-centric normative mainstream feminist models (e.g., see Tlostanova 2018) and provides a space for a diversity of voices and feminist positions. Foremost, the event is aimed at bridging a gap in empirical and theoretical understanding of feminism between various academic traditions (Anglo-American, post-Socialist, postcolonial).
The symposium is informed by the current geopolitical tensions in Europe. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted a rapid transformation of mediated feminisms in the region. We have witnessed a ‘diasporization’ of the feminist movement, and fragmentation of feminist academic networks as a consequence of political oppression, as well as an emergence of new feminist networks and activist hubs in different parts of the world. Feminist groups and media celebrities have adopted new media strategies to connect with the precarious communities within the conflict zones as well as to maintain their regular audience, ratings, and revenues elsewhere. These actions take place within the neoliberal digital economy with its lack of algorithmic transparency and constantly increasing regulation, precarity (e.g., the use of banned social networks via VPN), and militarization.
Against this background, we argue that the shifting media affordances and geopolitical upheavals reinvigorate the feminist movement potentially leading to an overhaul of the existing stereotypes related to feminism (such as feminists as antifamily, antifamine, radical, etc.) and allowing for complex trans/national feminist connections. If this is the case, what does this rupture mean for the role of the celebrity feminism? What sort of feminist sensibilities and solidarities are emerging today in Europe and beyond?
09.30 - 10.00 (EEST / UTC +3) Registration
10.00 - 10.10 Opening
10.15 - 11.15 Keynote session 1 w/ Professor Lucy Delap & Dominique Chadwick: Participatory film and gender justice in postcolonial Africa
11.30 - 13.00 Session A
- 1A Feminist Responses to anti-gender Politics
- 2A Popular feminism
- 3A Gendered violence & #MeToo
13.00 - 14.00 Lunch break
14.00 - 15.30 Session B
- 1B Intersectional feminist resistance
- 2B Platform Feminism & digital labour
- 3B Feminist literary interpretations
15.30 - 15.45 Coffee break
15.45 - 16.45 Keynote session 2 w/ Professor Laurie Essig: Feminism, Fascism, and the Future: Global Anti-Gender Ideology and the Fight of Our Lives
17.15 - 18.30 Reception
Please notice that time is set in EEST (Finland)
08.30 - 09.00 (EEST / UTC +3) Registration
09.00 - 10.30 Session C
- 1C War, women and nationhood
- 2C Discursive constructions of feminism
- 3C Trans-local feminism
10.45 - 12.00 Roundtable on methods
Digital entanglements: doing feminist research in the time of crisis
12.00 - 13.00 Lunch break
13.00 - 14.00 Keynote session 3 in conversation w/ Professor Catherine Rottenberg
14.00 - 14.30 Coffee break
14.30 - 16.00 Session D
- 1D Russian Feminist Performance & Political Protest
- 2D Networks of Feeling in Women’s Movement Magazines
- 3D Decolonial Perspectives
16.15 - 16.30 Closing remarks
Please notice that time is set in EEST (Finland)
Thursday 11.5.2023
Main building, Tampere University
Kalevantie 4, Tampere
Lyhty lounge area will be open for the conference participants and volunteers during the event on Thursday from 09.30 until 17.15 and on Friday from 08.30 until 18.00
& Dominique Chadwick
Participatory film and gender justice in postcolonial Africa
Chair: Saara Ratilainen
2A Popular feminism (A06)
3A Gendered violence & #MeToo (A05)
Location: Päätalo A05-A07, Main building
Open for the audience on-site.
Contentious feminism: feminist responses to anti-gender politics 1A Larisa Shpakovskaya, Maryna Shevtsova, Yuliya Brin
Popular feminism 2A
Demet Gülçiçek, Leonie Kapfer, Dr. Asli Kotaman, Fiona Noble
Gendered violence and #MeToo 3A
Abigail Loxham, Tanya Serisier, Keshia Dsilva, Ana Sofia Pereira, Carla Cerqueira
2B Platform Feminism & digital labour (A06)
3B Feminist literary interpretations (A05)
Location: Päätalo A05-A07, Main building
Open for the audience on-site.
Intersectional feminist resistance 1B
Dilara Asardag, Olena Nikolayenko, Natalia Kovyliaeva, Sama Khosravi Ooryad
Platform feminism and digital labour 2B
Christina Scharff, Hua Ma, Daria Kosinova, Ida Roivainen
Feminist literary interpretations 3B
Martina Napolitano, Leena Romu, Mukile Kasongo, Nicholas Wanberg, Jana Kostincová & Jaroslav Sommer
Location: Päätalo A05-A07
Feminism, Fascism, and the Future: Global Anti-Gender Ideology and the Fight of Our Lives
Chair: Daniil Zhaivoronok
Location: Minerva Aulakabinetti
Pinni B building, Tampere University
Kanslerinrinne 1, Tampere
Friday 12.5.2023
Main building, Tampere University
Kalevantie 4, Tampere
Lyhty lounge area will be open for the registered conference participants and authorized volunteers during the event
(Thu 09.30 - 17.15 / Fri 08.30 - 16.30)
2C Discursive constructions of feminism (A06)
3C Trans-local feminism (A05)
Location: Päätalo A05-A07, Main building
Open for the registered on-site audience.
War, women and nationhood 1C
Marja Lönnroth-Olin, Helen Lachal, Salomaa Hannu, Oksana Koshulko
Discursive Constructions of feminism 2C
Mónika Dánél, Almudena Mata-Núñez, Ella Poutiainen, Onur Kilic
Trans-local feminisms 3C
Carla Cerqueira, Ana Sofia Pereira, Lidia Salvatori, Anna Smoliarova
Speakers
Ekaterina Borozdina, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tampere University
Marjo Kolehmainen, Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies, University of Jyväskylä
Valentyna Shapovalova, PhD Fellow in Media Studies, at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen
Inna Perheentupa, Senior Researcher, University of Turku
Chairs: Saara Ratilainen & Galina Miazhevich
Location: Lyhty F001
Will be streamed. Open to the registered on-site audience.
2D Networks of Feeling in Women’s Movement Magazines
3D Decolonial Perspectives
Russian Feminist Performance and Political Protest 1D
Yana Meerzon, Varvara Sklez, Aleksandra Dunaeva
Networks of Feeling in Women’s Movement Magazines 2D
Dr Victoria Bazin, Dr Melanie Waters, Dr Eleanor Careless,
Sarah Pedersen
Decolonial perspectives 3D
Dinara Yangeldina, Nóra Ugron, Mohamed Ben Moussa
Location: Päätalo A05-A07, Main building
Bodies of Resistance
After the symposium, the FEMCORUS Team recommends visiting an exhibition by Del LaGrace Volcano "Bodies of Resistance" at Tampere Art Museum
- University of Nottingham, UK
Professor Catherine Rottenberg is a Professor of Feminist Thought and Culture in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her monographs include The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (2018) and Performing Americanness: Race, Class, and Gender in Modern African-American and Jewish-American Literature (2008). She is also the co-author of The Care Manifesto (2020) and editor of This Is Not A Feminism Textbook! (2023) and Black Harlem and the Jewish Lower East Side: Narratives out of Time (2013).
- Middlebury College, USA
Laurie Essig is Professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at Middlebury College. She is a sociologist who teaches courses on how power shapes our bodies and our desires Her courses include Sociology of Heterosexuality, White People, Men & Masculinities and Feminist Blogging. She is the author of Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self and the Other (Duke, 1999), American Plastic: Credit Cards, Boob Jobs and Our Quest for Perfection (Beacon, 2010) and Love, Inc.: Dating Apps, the Big White Wedding, and Chasing the Happily Neverafter. Essig has written for a variety of publications including the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Conversation and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
- University of Cambridge, UK
Professor Lucy Delap teaches history at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of Murray Edwards College. She has published widely on the history of feminism, gender, labour and media, including the prize-winning The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the early twentieth century, Knowing Their Place:Domestic Service in Twentieth Century Britain in 2011, and Feminisms: a global history in 2020.
Dr Dominique Chadwick works as an independent film consultant, reporting on humanitarian issues in over 40 countries. She has a life lifelong interest in the study of vulnerable rural communities and a belief in the power of participatory work to transform the lives of women and men of marginalised communities. Over the last 25 years she designed and ran participatory film projects with a strong focus on gender issues. Her work is premised on a commitment to training women in film production, leading them to share their untold stories on critical issues such as girls’ education, violence against women, polygamy, health, HIV/AIDS, land ownership, disability, child trafficking and forced marriage.
This paper explores practices of participatory film making, which grew in popularity in the 1990s and 2000s, inspired by critical pedagogy, newly affordable technologies and commitments to decolonising ‘development’ initiatives in the global South. A collaborative investigation by historian Lucy Delap and film director Dominique Chadwick outlines the practical and ethical concerns of feminist film making as ‘action research’, and locates it within the mediascape of the turn of the millennium, as well as the context of the HIV-AIDS epidemic. Offering case studies of film making in Ghana and newly-independent Namibia, the paper explores the uses of film and other media by local activist or non-governmental groups such as Namibia Women's Health Network and Sister Namibia. It reflects on film training, scripting, film production, film screening to local audiences in targeted rural communities and distribution as sites of systematic power asymmetries yet also points of leverage for social change and gender justice.
Chair: Saara Ratilainen
This talk will look at a variety of media spaces (Poland, Hungary, Argentina, Brazil, Spain, and the US) where the mobilization of anti-gender ideology has put our future in peril. The global anti-gender ideology began with the Catholic Church's response to attempts to insert basic sexual and reproductive rights in the UN's definition of universal human rights. It has since grown as the animating ideology of a variety of fascistic political movements. From Russia's 2014 anti-gay propaganda law to Texas's criminalization of parents who support trans-affirming care for their children, gender and sexuality are increasingly mobilized as a threat to the social order and as a folk devil for all that is wrong with the world, from economic hardships to immigration issues. The anti-gender ideology movement simultaneously attacks women and LGBTQ citizens and yet has united many feminist movements into powerful coalitions to fight for basic rights. And all of this is playing out in the public sphere in right wing media outlets and the feminist blogosphere and vlogosphere. By taking note of the ideological clash in the media, we can at least imagine that a future is possible.
Chair: Daniil Zhaivoronok
Chairs: Saara Ratilainen & Galina Miazhevich
Session A
- Feminist responses to anti-gender politics 1ALocation: Main building, A07
Chair: Marianna Muravyeva
Larisa Shpakovskaya
University of Helsinki
Feminist vs post-feminist thinking in transnational space: female academic migration from ‘East’ to ‘West’
Maryna Shevtsova
University of Ljubljana/Pompeu Fabra Barcelona
Limits of sisterhood: challenges in feminist solidarities in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine
Yuliya Brin
University of Helsinki
Belarussian women's representation in the media: from domestic violence to street protests - Popular feminism 2A
Location: Main building, A06
Chair: Oksana Koshulko
Demet Gülçiçek
University of Warwick & Munzur University
Turkey Popular is Political: Contradictions of Popular Feminism in Turkey
Leonie Kapfer
Universität Wien
“The personal is Political” – Between neoliberal feminism and a post-post-feminist sensibility
Asli Kotaman
University of Bonn
Feminism on a binge
Fiona Noble
University of Stirling
Superficial Feminism? Las uñas [Nails] (2018-, Atresmedia Studios) - Gendered violence & #MeToo 3ALocation: Main building, A05
Chair: Carla Cerqueira
Abigail Loxham
University of Liverpool
Mediating Popular Feminism in Spain
Tanya Serisier
Birkbeck, University of London
Public Survivors, Celebrity and Feminism in Australia
Keshia D'silva
PhD Student, Department of Social Psychology, University of Helsinki
Our safety is in our hands: Neoliberal feminism and gender advocacy in India
Ana Sofia Pereira, Carla Cerqueira, Célia Taborda
Universidade Lusófona - CICANT
From Global to Local to Glocal - Transnational Feminist Movements: The news coverage of #MeToo in Portugal
Session B
- Intersectional feminist resistance 1BLocation: Main building, A07
Chair: Tanya Serisier
Dilara Asardag
Tampere University
Queer/feminist online activism and cultures of visibility in Turkey
Olena Nikolayenko
Fordham University
Women’s Marches in Belarus: The Discourse of Resistance
Natalia Kovyliaeva
PhD candidate, Junior Research Fellow in Political Science Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu
Between Horror and Hope: Feminist Anti-War Resistance Performances and Strategies of Mobilizations in and outside of Putin's Russia
Sama Khosravi Ooryad
PhD Candidate
Revolutionary songs and transnational memetic resistance to religio-fascism and systemic misogyny: Video-collages, audio-memes, and performances during the ongoing feminist uprising in Iran - Platform Feminism & digital labour 2BLocation: Main building, A06
Chair: Saara Ratilainen
Daria Kosinova
PhD student, Tampere University
Idea of women’s empowerment as a strategic recruiting narrative in the gig economy: phenomenon of gendered social recruiting
Hua Ma
University of East Anglia
'I am doing makeup for myself, or am I?’: Choice, pleasure, and postfeminism in China
Ida Roivainen
Tampere University
‘How I edit my Instagram images”: investigating skilled vision in the work of YouTube’s “girlbosses”
Christina Scharff
King's College London
Digital feminist activism as platform labour? Creating content for Instagram and the politics of class - Feminist literary interpretations 3BLocation: Main building, A05
Chair: Valentyna Shapovalova
Martina Napolitano
University of Trieste
Where now? A decade of fempoeziya
Leena Romu
Tampere University
Imagining a world beyond binaries – Feminist utopianism and the activist potential of webcomics
Mukile Kasongo
University of Birmingham
Feminist translation Po Sovietski
Nicholas Wanberg
Tampere University
A Photosensitive Robot-Assisted Reading of White Women in Harry Potter Fanfiction
Jana Kostincová & Jaroslav Sommer Department of Russian Language and Literature, University of Hradec Kralove
Gender Will Die… Performative Challenging of Gender Boundaries in Contemporary Russian Literature
Session C
- War, Women and Nationhood 1CLocation: Main building, A07
Chair: Olena Nikolayenko
Marja Lönnroth-Olin
Doctoral researcher, University of Helsinki
Granny of steel - Discursive constructions of grandmotherhood and nationhood in online discussions of the war in Ukraine
Helen Lachal
PhD candidate, University of Nottingham
Women in the military: how the Soviet children’s magazine Murzilka portrayed servicewomen between 1956 – 1964.
Hannu Salomaa
PhD researcher
Finnish national defense from a gender equality point of view
Oksana Koshulko
Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study (HIAS)
Russia’s war in Ukraine: Feminist solidarity, disunity and ‘voices of honor’ - Discursive Constructions of Feminism 2CLocation: Main building, A06
Chair: Olga Nikolayeva
Mónika Dánél
Eötvös Loránd University
Accented Gender Roles – Post/Socialist Bodies and East-West/West-East Mobility in Contemporary Hungarian, Romanian and German Cinema
Almudena Mata-Núñez
University of Seville
Middle-aged women and sexuality. The case of Fleabag
Ella Poutiainen
University of Turku
Sacred – Not Political – Feminism. Discursive Constructions of Feminism in Contemporary Feminine Spiritualities - Trans-local Feminism 3CLocation: Main building, A05
Chair: Ana Sofia Pereira
Carla Cerqueira, Célia Taborda, Ana Sofia Pereira, Priscilla Domingos Universidade Lusófona - CICANT
Once Upon a Time… A Historical Chronology on the Singularities of Portuguese Feminism(s)
Lidia Salvatori
University of Loughborough
(Trans)feminism and the challenge to femonationalist politics in Italy
Anna Smoliarova
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
If you tweeted about it, you heard about it: an attempt to measure the international resonance of a national case against a feminist activist
Session D
- Russian Feminist Performance and Political Protest 1DLocation: Main building, A07
Chair: Martina Napolitano
Speakers:
Yana Meerzon
University of Ottawa
Varvara Sklez
Warwick University
Women’s Histories: Performing Difficult Past in Russian Theatre of the 2010s
Aleksandra Dunaeva
Independent scholar
Feminist practices in the context of the independent Russian theatre during the latter half of the 2010s - Networks of Feeling in Women’s Movement Magazines 2DLocation: Main building, A06
Chair: Dilara Asardag
Speakers:
Victoria Bazin
Northumbria University
‘I can’t wait’: Affect and the ‘not yet’ of Women’s Movement Magazines
Melanie Waters
Northumbria University
‘WE’RE ANGRY!’ Reading Revolutionary Rage in the Feminist Periodical
Eleanor Careless
Northumbria University
Angels in the Architecture: The Lonely Subjects of Feminist Periodicals
Sarah Pedersen
Robert Gordon University
Pernilla Severson
Linnaeus University
British press representations of Nordic women politicians 1900-1939 - Decolonial Perspectives 3DLocation: Main building, A05
Chair: Mukile Kosongo
Speakers:
Nóra Ugron
University of Turku
Creating queer and multispecies Eastern European subjects: Queer-feminist literary and activist practices in Romania
Mohamed Ben Moussa
University of Sharjah
Diasporic Arab Women Vloggers and Identity Narratives as Decolonial Discourse
Dinara Yangeldina
UiB, Senter for kvinne- og kjønnsforskning
When post-feminism meets Russian post-coloniality: examining Tatar makeover show Min
Roundtable on methods
Digital entanglements: doing feminist research in the time of crisis
Safer space guidelines at the conference
Tampere University has adopted a safety charter that commits to providing all our staff, students and campus users with a healthy environment where they feel safe and are free from any form of harassment and discrimination.
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