The Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies in cooperation with her partners organises the nineteenth round of the DOING GENDER Lecture Series. These lectures stress the importance of doing gender work combined with an active involvement in the practice of gender theory and research. The concept of DOING GENDER supports a hands-on approach to gender issues in the sense of social and political engagement with the new forms of gender inequalities that are taking shape in the world today. The lecture series wants to give space to the new generations of gender theorists and practitioners and to perspectives that innovate the field and do gender in new ways. Key is the notion of doing gender: what is the state of the art definition of gender? How do contemporary scholars and activists utilise this definition?

On Thursday November 15, 2018 Ana Dragojlovic will give a Doing Gender Lecture on Politics of Queer Affect: Intentionality, Mediation, Intervention in Indisch Memory Work.

Politics of Queer Affect argues for the need to rethink the intentional deployment of affective politics as an intervention into the residual traces left by long histories of armed conflict, forced mobility, racism, and their gendered character. I analyze the politics of queer affect employed by interracial Indisch (Indo-Dutch) women as their investment in reshaping the Indisch individual and collective future – a future that celebrates the queer practices and discourses that Indisch families and communities have historically engaged in, but that have been repressed by the normative forces of the colonial and post-colonial racialized regimes of citizenship imposed on interracial subjects. I argue that the modes of intentional affective politics created through Indisch women’s interventions are as radical in their critique of the pathologization of non-conformance to normative understandings of family, society, and biological reproduction and of non-normative female subjectivity, as they are critical of colonialism, racism, and contemporary structural inequalities.

Bio Ana Dragojlovic is a Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Melbourne. Dragojlovic’s research and teaching interests are situated at the intersection of feminist, queer, postcolonial, and affect theory with a primary focus on gender and mobility; violence, memory, and trauma. She is the author of Beyond Bali: Subaltern Citizens and Post-Colonial Intimacy, Amsterdam University Press 2016 and a co-author of Bodies and Suffering: Emotions and Relations of Care (Routledge, 2017, with Alex Broom). She has published in journals like Australian Feminist Studies, Gender, Place and Culture: Journal of Feminist Geography, Subjectify, and Journal of Intercultural Studies among others.

Details lecture:
Thursday November 15, 2018
Lecture:               Politics of Queer Affect: Intentionality, Mediation, Intervention in Indisch Memory Work
Time:                    15:30 – 17:00 hrs
Location:             Utrecht University – Drift 25, room 0.02
Chair:                   Prof. Rosemarie Buikema
Registration is compulsory: nog@uu.nl