This project, funded by the British Academy Newton International Fellowship scheme, will support Dr Lila Braunschweig (Sciences Po) in carrying out her postdoctoral research with Dr Flora Renz, Kent Law School, at the University of Kent.
The project asks: How can we alter and transform gender norms that negatively affect the lives of many women, as well as LGBTQ* people? This project seeks to answer this question by looking at the role of gender regulations and assignations in the reproduction of gender norms. Drawing on materialist, as well as queer and critical trans feminist perspectives, this project asks what collective challenges to structural gender norms might be possible.
“Using case studies as a basis, the project theorizes an underexplored resistance strategy to gender norms that it conceptualizes as a politics of non-assignation and norm alleviation,” says Flora, “to do this, the project proposes a critical reconstruction of the ‘neutral’, drawing on an innovative reading of the work of French thinker Roland Barthes as well as on echoing traces of this approach in queer and feminist scholarships. The overall objective of this project is therefore threefold: to characterize and theorize such a feminist and queer theory of the neutral, highlight its contribution to contemporary reflections on gender justice; and investigate its core practical, ethical, legal, and political implications.”
Congratulations to Flora on this achievement. For further details, read the full article on the Kent Law School News site. Read more about this project on the British Academy Newton Fellowship Funding News page.