Commentary title: "Are We Post-Enlightenment? Queer Questions for Epistemic (In)Justices. A Commentary to Dr Polynczuk-Alenius': ‘Reality’, ‘truth’, and the democratic imagination in journalistic reporting on antiracist, queer, and feminist activism in Poland"
In this invited contribution, Dr Kulpa will share reflections on how EDI (equality, diversity, and inclusion) and decolonialisation work in the UK academic contexts, embedded in the processes of neoliberalization of higher education in the anglophone contexts.
Roberto Kulpa talked about: Mapping so-called ‘anti-gender’ discourses in parliamentary and media spaces across the ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ geopolitical imaginations of ‘Europe’ at the 7th European Geographies of Sexualities Conference (EGSC) 2024, held at University of Brighton, Sept 2024. https://2024.egsconference.com
Dr Kulpa's talk addressed findings from the RESIST project:
theresistproject.eu/
Abstract:
Anti-feminist and anti-LGBTIQ+ mobilisations have taken roots transnationally, denying individuals autonomy, rights to bodily integrity or self-determination, and attacking selected groups of people (e.g. trans* people, people doing abortion) in order to pursue dehumanising and exclusionary agendas. In the ongoing battle against them, national and international queer-feminist insurgencies have been developing spaces of resistances and fightback. ‘Identity politics’, one way or another, is thus a space of tensions and dis-comforts of politics, where actors, issues, and strategies constantly manoeuvre and reposition themselves to aggregate or ease the arising frictions. Symbolic and real geo-temporalities of political loci have been a significant contributing factor in these processes.
This presentation will empirically draw on the research findings from the RESIST Project (https://theresistproject.eu) on the parliamentary and media ‘anti-gender’ debates in the UK, PL, HU, CH, and the European Parliament to engage with the following issues:
•how ‘dis-comfort’ features as an element of the ‘anti-gender’ politics in Polish and transnational contexts;
•porous and un-comfortable thresholds across media and parliaments as places of (trans)national politics;
•syncretic benefits and obstacles emerging from those ‘threshold of dis-comforts’ that re-create imaginary geopolitics of ‘the ‘east’ and ‘west’ in the ‘anti-gender’ (scholarly, political, activist) debates;
•thinking forward about recommendations and next steps needed in our fight against inequalities and for the better, queer-feminist futures.
Keywords:
‘anti-gender’, LGBTIQ+ equalities, parliamentary and media discourses, queer-feminist resistances, threshold politics.
The RESIST Project: Press Release. FINDINGS FROM THE 2nd STAGE OF THE PROJECT RELEASED
Headline: RESIST reveals the ‘heartbreaking’ impact of so-called ‘anti-gender’ politics across Europe
Lead: The RESIST project, which is investigating so-called ‘anti-gender’ politics across Europe, has discovered several negative consequences, including ‘systemic, institutional discrimination’.
Linked Funders
EC European Commission
UKRI UK Research and Innovation
Dr Calum Neill will co-host an international conference at Ghent University on the 21st and 22nd of September to launch his new co-edited book, Reading Lacan's Ecrits: From 'Signification of the Phallus' to 'Metaphor of the Subject'. The book is the first part of a three volume commentary on Jacques Lacan's Ecrits. The Ecrits is widely regarded as one of the most significant texts of 20th century thought. Reading Lacan's Ecrits is the first complete guide to this work.
