Book launch: Feeling Gender
This seminar presents and discusses a new book by Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen: Feeling Gender. A Generational and Psychosocial Approach, published by Palgrave-Macmillan.
Feelings of gender at different times and places are a relatively neglected aspect of the social transformation of gender. The concern in the book is that social transformation of gender also involve the work of feelings. Gender attains emotional meaning through the life course and in the transmission between generations at a particular time.
The book explores the link between such generational transition and the negotiations and calibrations between women and men belonging to the same generation. To understand this dimension of social change it is necessary to look into subtle and gradual historical processes working on the level of gender identities and gendered subjectivities, including motivations/capacities for autonomy in women and emotional intimacy in men, which may have provided a psychological readiness for structural and cultural changes and political interventions.
The empirical basis for the analysis is a longitudinal research project that explores the feelings of gender across three generations of a sample of white, heterosexual women and men of different class backgrounds as they moved from childhood and youth to adult life, and what impact these feelings had on changing gender practices. New life projects gradually came into being, not only as outcomes of externally imposed norms, but also as the work of subjective feelings of gender.
Program
The book will be reviewed and commented upon by:
Professor Valerie Walkerdine, Cardiff University, UK
Professor em. Hanne Haavind, Dept. of Psychology, University of Oslo
Ass. Professor Helene Aarseth, STK, University of Oslo
After the seminar the participants in the seminar are invited to join an informal reception with refreshments.