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The Emergence of Gendered Power Structures since Early Modern Times: Practices, Norms, Media

International Conference of the Research Network Gender - Power - State

Venue: Philipps-University Marburg, Herder-Institute Marburg and online / Date: November 23-25, 2022

Registration for online-participation: gms@uni-marburg.de
Deadline: 21.11.2022

Program

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Thursday, November 24, 2022

Friday, November 25, 2022

Keynotes

• Inhalt ausklappen Inhalt einklappen Myra Marx Ferree: Contested Modernity in Family Gender Regimes

  Wednesday, November 23, 2022, 18:30 - 20:00
  Virtual lecture open to the university public; join via the link below.
  
  The storms of the present moment in Europe as well as the US make it impossible to ignore contestations over both gender and national identity as features of modern politics. However, nationalisms and their threats to democracy and peace, and the right wing mobilizations against gender and sexual diversity are not always recognized as being related. The former is commonly understood as a conventionally political defense of democracy as an institution, the latter as a “culture war” based in identities rather than institutions. I argue here that the connections between democracy and demography are best understood through considerations of the contested changes in family as a crucial institution of politics, not a separate sphere. 
  Demographic transitions are fundamental parts of the social changes we associate now with modernity, and the modern family that is the contemporary normative standard is framed misleadingly as “traditional” or even “Biblical.” Modernity for the family came as a contested development along with democracy and industrialism, was contested among capitalists, unions, suffragists and religious reformers. The modern family is not eternally the standard, however. The changes that are prompting some to defend this modern family in apocalyptic terms are real transformations in how families have been organized in the past fifty years. The modern family, which relies on a breadwinner and elevates national (or class) identity in the form of brotherhood, is becoming old-fashioned. The changes that make breadwinner-brotherhood based families unmodern are materially technological, geographic, and political, but are contested in terms of values, beliefs and identities. The present demographic transition is far from complete, but it suggests wider, highly contested changes in politics, including the rise of nationalism as a response to the challenges of connecting family and nation as forms of social membership, and the declining practical significance for the nation-state as a political form.
  
  

  https://uni-marburg.webex.com/uni-marburg/j.php?MTID=md552fa90228a6d77f2763e95199acbe2
  Wednesday, Nov 23, 2022 2:00 pm | 6 hours | (UTC+01:00) Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna
  Meeting number: 2734 428 4319
  Password: qQYd22Degj2

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  Dial 27344284319@uni-marburg.webex.com
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• Inhalt ausklappen Inhalt einklappen Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly: Images of Female Power from Elizabeth I of England to Angela Merkel

  Thursday, November 24, 2022, 09:00 - 10:00
  
  This talk will interrogate the official portraits of powerful women from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. It will ask in what way the iconography of the male ruler as warrior or Roman emperor was adapted to depict the female ruler. It will ask whether the female ruler was usually depicted as an honorary her as the Mother of the Nation. It will ask to what extent depictions of the female ruler emphasized what were thought of as particularly female virtues such as mercy, compassion and piety and what messages were conveyed in portraits by such external elements such as clothing or interiors. It will ask how the stages in the life cycle of powerful women were depicted as they moved from princess to consort to widowed regent. It will ask what difference the change of medium from oils to photography made and what is expected of a modern oil painting of a female ruler. Finally, it will ask whether the iconographic patterns established in the early modern period are still valid in our own day. 

• Inhalt ausklappen Inhalt einklappen Claudia Ulbrich: Unbridgeable Differences? Gender Constructions in the Early Modern Period

  Thursday, November 24, 2022, 14:30 - 15:30
  
  Since gender became an object of historical research in the early modern period, numerous studies have uncovered the contradictions and complexity of gender relations embedded in premodern societies. In Western cultures a binary gender system that considered men and women as opposites and a gender hierarchy designed in favor of men has been postulated for centuries at the level of the gender order. On this level it seems to be an anthropological constant that men are strong and important in public life while women are weak and close to nature. The situation is different for the spheres of action of men and women in their lifeworld and as far as individual gender relations are concerned. They have been subject to historical change. (Many examples of women who have exercised power show that gender is only one of many categories that affect women's agency.) Gender relations and the agency of men and women did not follow the same rules as the gender order but are related to each other. Between these various levels a seemingly insurmountable tension arises. How can we bridge these differences in gender constructions? What does this mean for the categories we work with? What consequences does this have in terms of how we narrate the story of powered gender relations?

• Inhalt ausklappen Inhalt einklappen Birgit Sauer: The State as an Intersectional and Gendered Relation of Violence

  Friday, November 25, 2022, 09:00 - 10:00
  
  Feminist scholars have been pointing out since the 1970s that the state is not neutral, that it is not an expression of the common good, but that it is patriarchal. State power, then, not only organizes gender binary, but the modern state emerges from gender relations. Its institutions are characterized by hierarchical gender binary. With the emergence of modern state administrations, institutions, and norms, other relations of inequality were inscribed into state power – production and class relations, heterosexual structures of privilege, ethnicized and racialized structures of inequality. 
  The lecture will first develop an understanding of modern statehood that goes beyond the state apparatus and also understands the state as a contested strategic field. It is in contestations in this field that intersectionally gendered state institutions, administrations, and norms emerge. The state can be conceptualized as the condensation of intersectional gendered relations of domination. 
  Moreover, and this will be explained in the next step of the talk, the modern state is a gendered relation of violence. After all, in these struggles over statehood, notions of separation of public and private and of non-intervention of the state in the supposed private sphere, i.e., the delegation of the power of disposition of the head of the household over the privatized household members, have become inscribed in the architecture of the state. 
  In the final step, I will reflect on perspectives for change: This expanded understanding of the state not only allows us to understand the violent nature of the state with respect to intersectional gender relations, but also opens up perspectives of agency, that is, of change in and against the state. However, this potential for change is limited – the integration of women, e.g., into state institutions does not guarantee a gender-equal transformation of the state, but it does provide a position in the state field of contestation and struggles.