My experience at the Feminist Theory Workshop
Earlier this year, on March 22nd-23rd I was very fortunate to attend the 17th annual Feminist Theory workshop held at Duke University in North Carolina, USA, made possible thanks to a gracious studentship funded by the School of Sociology and Social Policy and co-sponsored by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies. Attended by hundreds of academics across the globe, the Feminist Theory Workshop (FTW) is a space that places urgency and necessity on thinking about intersections of gender, race, class, sexuality, and nation in methodological and theoretical praxis. The workshop invites feminist scholars across disciplines and national boundaries to come together and evaluate feminist theory with critical attention to prevalent issues and crises of ecological devastation, settler colonialism, genocide, racial capitalism, rampant consumerism, and changes in globalisation.
Duke University was a beautiful setting to host the event, with blooming cherry blossoms and the picturesque Duke Chapel decorating the campus, and the neighbouring Sarah P. Gardens a 5-minute walk. As well as taking in the scenery of Duke University, I was very grateful for the opportunity to meet with other PhD students and early career researchers from across the world, engaged in feminist research, who I otherwise would have not met.
In its 17th year, conference organisers Robyn Wiegman and Jennifer Nash, amongst the labours of others, invited Grace Kyungwon Hong, Jasbir Puar, Julie Livingston and Kevin Quashie to speak on new demands and ways of theorising in feminist scholarship. Following the keynote speakers, the workshop invited attendees to attend smaller breakout seminar session with other researchers to discuss and reflect on our thoughts and a final Q&A panel to round off the event. The workshop was grounded by a pluralist approach to feminist theory. Jennifer Nash, conference introducer and Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University, advocated and encouraged thinking and holding multiple and contesting ideas simultaneously. This often means ‘sitting with’ ambivalence and feminist uncertainty on complex and nuanced debates, but also holding space for certainty on political and social catastrophes.
A key component of all the discussions over the two days was the urgency in which feminist theory must demand social justice and be active in resisting Western imperialist, colonial and capitalist structures of oppression. Jasbir Puar, spoke with vigour on the genocide in Gaza, drawing necessary attention to the selective de-habilitation of populations through military tactics of ‘maiming’ and perpetual injuring. Jasbir critiqued the rise of an Israeli ‘homonationalism’ in which liberal LGBTQ+ politics have been co-opted to wash over the genocide and erasure of Palestinians. Urgency was also echoed in Julie Livingstone’s talk around the embodied mind and climate crisis, in which she articulated that biochemical process are always implicated in the social world. She interrogated how the increase in harmful chemical processes such as air pollution and temperature increase, perpetuated through capitalist powers of environmental devastation, correlate with thoughts of self-destruction.
One of the most provocative takeaways that resonated with my own research practice was the centralising of relationality and care in methodological approaches. Grace Kyongwon Hong advocated that archival research studying ‘ghosts’ should not simply extract information about their histories but think of these subjects as ‘kin’; nurturing, relating to them, and engaging in ceremony with them. She argued for a relationality that went beyond a recognition of pain and oppression of these people, but a relationship of accompaniment, that bridges the binary between our own lives and those of ghosts.
Likewise, Kevin Quashie argued for ‘knowing of’ 20th century Black writers through theological thinking, attending to the form of their art, poetry and writing, not merely the content of their work. Quashie advocates for methodological practice framed in Black feminist critique to find new ways to think about subjects by pertaining to the ordinary. In his examination of the poetic works of Lucille Clifton, Quashie understands the materiality of her poems themselves as knowledge forms, not of Lucille as a ‘subject’ of racist oppression.
These conversations spoke broadly to the significance of decolonising knowledge practices, in which feminist theory should find new ways of thinking about subjects by rejecting Western epistemologies that have historically devalued psychic, embodied, emotional and spiritual practices. In his talk, Kevin Quashie resisted a rationality discourse that to ‘know’ is to separate rationality from emotionality. Instead, he rejected a mind/body dualism in place of centralising emotions and art as a praxis for thinking and living, “thinking is a process of feeling and feeling is how the body thinks”.
My experience of the Feminist Theory Workshop was provocative, thoughtful, and exciting. I have begun to question my own epistemology and methodological approaches and will be constantly reflecting and re-evaluating my own research in light of the conversations I had and engaged with. My research focuses on the experiences and subjectivities of digital sex workers, considering the ways in which workers understand their labour and identities in navigating an unstable, competitive digital economy. The research is grounded in a feminist poststructuralist methodology, which centralises the discourses and language that interviewees use in giving meaning to their experience. The workshop gave me the opportunity to develop my methodological approach, in thinking about the ways in which emotions, bodies, and relationships are subjects of knowledge. Whilst the language and discourses workers use to understand their experience is important, I have begun to focus more on the ways in which their emotions affect their practices, and how ‘feelings’ shapes the ways in which they understand, talk about and experience their work.
I do, however, think there is space to reflect on the inclusivity of academic events, workshops, and conferences, especially for neurodivergent and disabled researchers. For feminist theory to be leveraged, disseminated across wider audiences, and implicated in practice and policy, it should be communicated using as much accessible language as possible and with a variety of different learning formats. Whilst I learnt and engaged with much of the dialogue at the Feminist Theory Workshop, as a neurodivergent researcher, I found the lack of visual presentations, breaks throughout longer talks and sensory friendly spaces, meant it was more difficult for me to process information. Whilst feminist theory is complex and challenging, for the experience to be more inclusive, the workshop could have made additional learning materials available, especially for those with audio processing differences, e.g. slideshows, written handouts and/or speaker abstracts. There was evidently a lot of time and care that went into the organisation of the event and this critique is reflective of many academic spaces. I would encourage these spaces to continuously reflect and be active in making spaces inclusive, so as not to contribute to any epistemic injustice that excludes the voices of disabled feminist thinkers.