Maria Malmström
Maria Malmström is a Doctor of Social Anthropology at the School of Global Studies, Anthropology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her dissertation examined how female gender identity is continually created and re-created in Egypt through a number of daily practices, of which female circumcision is central. The study explored how the subject is made through the interplay of global hegemonic structures of power and the most intimate sphere, which has been exposed in the international arena. She is today involved (and completing) in the inter-disciplinary research project “Hamas between Sharia rule and Demo-Islam.” The study aims to investigate in what way Hamas will adopt to the new realities on the ground. Furthermore, she is a Gender Helpdesk consultant (Sida, Conref and ÖSB consulting), board member of WIDE (Network Women in Development, Europe) and e.g. member of the Arabic Think Tank for women, Egypt. Until 2010 fall semester she also worked as a lecturer, project coordinator at GADNET/GADIP (Gender and Development Network/Gender and Development in practice), and project coordinator of Sida’s Gender Helpdesk at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her areas of interest are the MENA region, gender, body, sexuality, politics, violence, and security.
Current research:
Bodies and Bombs: Productions of Violent Militarized Masculinities among Male Hamas Youths
Why and how young men choose to join violent terrorist/military organizations—often with the aim of dying in order to use their bodies as deadly weapons— is a question which continues to puzzle social scientists, the policy world, as well as societ(ies) at large. This enduring question, which is ultimately about humanity and the seduction of violence, has become particularly salient given the changing global security-development landscape. The character of contemporary danger, threat, uncertainty, and belonging; the prevalence of terrorism as a seemingly viable political response to injustice; and the (US led) global war on Terror which is being waged in the intimate lives of peoples in disparate sites all over the world, render re-asking this question in distinct and varied ways an imperative. However, despite a general consensus that understanding the call to violence is vital to mitigating its effects—there is surprisingly little research that explores the intimate and complex production of violent (male) subjects in militant organizations. This research project therefore explores this overarching question in relation to young male Hamas members and the appeal of becoming soldiers in the context of the Hamas in the Palestinian – Israel struggle. The research sets out to explore who these militant actors are and who they desire to become in the hopes of gaining a better understanding of the ways in which their subjectivities and agency are informed by, and animated through, their desire to inhabit a ‘violent’ subject position. Central to such a line of inquiry is an exploration into the ways in which these young men’s experiences of masculinities are shaped and challenged by political, religious, economic and social changes that impinge on their lives.
Márcia Elisa Moser
Márcia Elisa Moser is Assistant Lecturer at the Institute for the Scientific Study of Religion at Free University Berlin. She holds an M.A. in Gender Studies and is a Ph.D. candidate in the Study of Religion. She co-edited Frau-Gender-Queer: Gendertheoretische Ansätze in der Religionswissenschaft (Würzburg, 2010), an anthology concerned with gender/theoretical approaches to the study of religion. In 2009/2010 she held the position as Women’s Officer and is founding member of the Interdisciplinary Forum for Gender and Diversity Studies both at the Department of History and Cultural Studies, Free University Berlin. Her research interests are feminist approaches, gender/queer theory and intersectionality and their integration into the study of religion.
Current research:
Christian Sexualities and Double Commitment: On Meaning and Function of the recent Christian debate on ‘Homosexuality’ in Germany
My Ph.D. project is concerned with the interrelatedness of religion and sexuality from a non-theological point of view. This interrelatedness will be analyzed on the basis of Christian positions about homosexuality. The Christian debate on homosexuality since the 1960s in Germany marks the historical and cultural frame of the analysis. A special interest of this analysis is to question the different definitions of homosexuality and their knowledge foundations. First, in this context “homosexuality” is defined in dissociation from general “sexuality”, i.e., “heterosexuality”, and in combination with questions of gender identity. In my PhD project I will take on the concern of theorizing the correlating Christian concepts of sexuality and gender. Secondly, apart from religious and theological sources to define and evaluate homosexuality (as for example the bible itself) there are many quotations from psychological, medical or anthropological sources. I want to focus on these references of non-religious and non-theological knowledge and highlight the strategies of how they are linked to Christian argumentations.
This focus is related to my theoretical understanding of religion as a social category. Accordingly, religious doctrines are constantly challenged by social change and need to be justified or updated steadily. In this process, knowledge from other scientific, ideological or social areas is taken up and discussed within the Christian debate. With regard to Christian theology’s own knowledge these foundations from other sources are either negated or integrated into a Christian theological argumentation. In my Ph.D. project I want to examine how this transfer of religious and secular knowledge takes place. As such religion is always to be understood and analyzed within specific historical and social contexts and can hardly be separated from them. My approach to theoretically rethink the interrelatedness of religion and sexuality is build on the idea of conceiving of them as historical and social categories.
A further focal point of my work is to investigate the relevance of the issue sexuality in fights regarding the “true” understanding of being Christian and the “true” essence of Christianity itself. Concerning the Christian debate on homosexuality I am especially interested in questioning why homosexuality should be a challenge for Christian identity. I argue that the Christian debate on homosexuality is not just an expression of religious conflicts over sexual ethics which focus on the question of how to define sexuality, but that the debate also circles around the essential definition of “being Christian”.
Sandeep Parmar
Sandeep Parmar received her PhD in English Literature from University College London in 2008. The subject of her research was the unpublished autobiographies of the modernist poet Mina Loy. She received an MA in Creative Writing (poetry) from the University of East Anglia in 2003 and studied for her BA at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the Reviews Editor for The Wolf magazine and was Member of High Table at Newnham College, Cambridge from 2008-2009, where she was editing the writings of the modernist poet Hope Mirrlees. Mirrlees’ Collected Poems will be published by Fyfield Books (Carcanet) in 2011. She has published various articles on Loy’s archived prose: one in Jacket magazine and a chapter in the forthcoming Salt Companion to Mina Loy. A selection of her poetry will appear in the forthcoming anthology, Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe Books, 2009). She has taught Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Hertfordshire, the Open University and the University of Cambridge.
Current research:
‘Discoverers of the Not-known’: Travel and Collaboration in Modernist Women’s Autobiography
Since writing about Loy’s autobiographies, I have been increasingly drawn towards the possibilities that travel offered modernist women writers. I aim to explore the dimension of collaboration between women writers of the early twentieth century and to uncover how much the joint adventures of travel enabled them to create autobiographical selves away from the gendered constraints of home, family and national identity. My research considers the writings of Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962), H.D. (1886-1961), Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978) and Mina Loy, who all left Britain (for varying periods of time) in order to construct fictional (and sometimes mythical) autobiographical selves. In addition to these writers’ travel and residence away from England, I am interested in their collaborations with writers who accompanied them—in most cases their female companions—and how they might have influenced their counterpart’s refashioning of an autobiographical ‘self’. The effect of increased access via trains, airplanes and automobiles as well as greater freedom due to education, literacy and democratization are central to the expanding mobility of the modern woman. The historical figure of the traveler—modeled as much after the scholarly aristocrat on a ‘grand tour’ as the medieval religious pilgrim—offered women a place in what Sidonie Smith describes as the ‘cultural logic of the individualizing journey’. Indeed, travel as a singularly masculine endeavor, contrary to the homogenizing realm of feminized domestic space, provided for some women writers the necessary distance to create alternative autobiographical selves. Travel, and its transformative powers, is at the center of my approach, as well as the necessity for women to travel with other women (if not accompanied by men). Early twentieth-century women, restricted by propriety from traveling alone, would have traveled together without fear of damaging their reputations or inviting unwanted attention. In three of the four pairs of women writers in this proposed study, lesbian relationships were disguised by either scholarly pursuit or the illusion of married women traveling on holiday together (or to rejoin their husbands). In this way, the journey is a move to define not the individual woman so much as the unnamable union of two secret lovers.
Alpesh Patel
Alpesh Patel is an independent art historian and curator. He received his B.A. in 1997 with distinction in art history from Yale University and completed his Ph.D. last year at the University of Manchester, England. His doctoral dissertation on queer South Asian visual cultures has been reciprocally shaped by his organization of the 2007 exhibition “‘Mixing It Up: Queering Curry Mile and Currying Canal Street,” a series of public art projects and performances that were situated in over seven museums and public spaces throughout the city of Manchester. He has delivered talks on his research in Europe and the US and has several academic publications in press or forthcoming.
From 1997 to 2005 he was based in New York City where he worked in the curatorial and director’s offices of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. He is currently based in Florida and New York.
Current research:
Queer(ing) Desi as Visual Knowledge
My current book project is an interdisciplinary study of urban culture, art and cultural policy, and social identities across the “Brown Atlantic” — the conceptual and geographical transnational space roughly bound by British colonialism (the South Asian subcontinent, the U.S., and the U.K.). More specifically, this project identifies the tensions and intersections between “queer” and “Desi” (the Hindi word meaning “from my country”) as identities through a consideration of the politics of the production and consumption of a broad range of visual material (from fine art to advertising ephemera) within various spaces (cultural, urban, and public) in the U.S. and U.K. Reflecting my interdisciplinary approach, I bring into productive dialogue a wide-ranging group of theoretical models (aesthetic, queer, and postcolonial) through the lens of both traditional disciplines of social science (urban studies, geography, and sociology) and humanities (art history and visual studies, film studies, and philosophy).
