Affective Intimacies – Webinar on Tue May 16, 2023 (16.00 Finnish time, EEST)
We are very pleased to announce the publication of Affective Intimacies, a collection edited by Marjo Kolehmainen, Annukka Lahti and Kinneret Lahad (Manchester University Press, 2022). We thus warmly welcome you to join a webinar where two authors introduce their ground-breaking work, followed by two stellar commentaries. The event takes place online on Tuesday May 16, 2023 between 16.00-17.30, is free of charge and no registration is required – all welcome.
Dresda E. Méndez de la Brena asks what ‘care’ means when we go about thinking and living interdependently with beings other than humans in disabled worlds. Her chapter pinpoints the limits of human care while introducing two queer love stories, one about the process of becoming-in-love between her and her partner, and the second love story between her narcoleptic partner and smoking. Here cigarettes are acknowledged to be providing crucial care since they help the narcoleptic partner to cope with her illness.
Keywords: caring matter, dis/ability, love story, queer studies
Tuula Juvonen introduces the groundbreaking idea of ‘lesboratories’ as she makes an inquiry into the role of matter in the making of lesbians. Looking at past gay and lesbian communities, her chapter taps into the question of venues that were also actively participating in the production of what was then an emerging idea of a lesbian. It argues that lesboratories as affective spaces influenced both the ways in which women were able to become lesbians and how they were able to create communities of their own.
Keywords: lesbian; space; materiality; affect; intra-action
Tuesday May 16, 2023 at 16.00 EEST TIME
16.00-17.30
Zoom: https://uef.zoom.us/j/67550392740
16.00-16.10 Welcome and brief introduction:
Opening words: Gender research network “Kantti” (Sari Sulkunen, Associate professor, University of Jyväskylä, FIN)
Brief introduction by editors: Dr Marjo Kolehmainen (University of Jyväskylä, FIN), Dr Annukka Lahti (University of Eastern Finland, FIN) and Dr Kinneret Lahad (University of Tel-Aviv, Israel)
16.10-16.40
Dresda E. Méndez de la Brena (Horizon Postdoctoral Fellow (Communication Studies Department) and Steering Committee Member (Access in the Making Lab) at Concordia University, CA): Caring matter’. A love story of queer intimacies between (her) body and object (her cigarette)
Commentary: Hannele Harjunen (Associate Professor in Sociology of Sport, University of Jyväskylä, FIN)
16.40-17.10
Tuula Juvonen (Senior lecturer in Gender Studies, Tampere University, FIN): Becoming a lesbian at lesbian and gay dance parties. Lesboratories as affective spaces
Commentary: Arja Turunen (University Teacher in museology, Open university of the University of Jyväskylä and the Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies, FIN)
17.10-17.30 Q&A
About the book:
Affective intimacies is recent collection by Manchester University Press. It provides a novel platform to re-evaluate the notion of open-ended intimacies through the lens of affect theories. Contributors address the embodied, affective and psychic, sensorial and embodied aspects of their ongoing intimate entanglements across various timely phenomena. This fascinating collection asks how the study of affect enables us to rethink intimacies, what affect theories can do to the prevailing notion of intimacy and how they renew and enrich theories of intimacy in a manner which also considers its normative and violent forms.
The volume has been made freely available online, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Link to the open access version: https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/view/9781526158574/9781526158574.xml
The event is jointly organised by Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä; Gender research network “Kantti” at University of Jyväskylä; and Department of Social Sciences, University of Eastern Finland.
More information: Annukka Lahti (annukka.lahti@uef.fi)