Advances in Critical Diversities Book Series

This book brings together a diverse range of critical interventions in sexuality and gender studies, and seeks to encourage new ways of thinking about the connections and tensions between sexual politics, citizenship and belonging. The book is organized around three interlinked thematic areas, focusing on sexual citizenship, nationalism and international borders (Part 1); sexuality and "race" (Part 2); and sexuality and religion (Part 3). In revisiting notions of sexual citizenship and belonging, contributors engage with topical debates about "sexual nationalism," or the construction of western/European nations as exceptional in terms of attitudes to sexual and gender equality vis-à-vis an uncivilized, racialized "Other." The collection explores macro-level perspectives by attending to the geopolitical and socio-legal structures within which competing claims to citizenship and belonging are played out; at the same time, micro-level perspectives are utilized to explore the interplay between sexuality and "race," nation, ethnicity and religious identities. Geographically, the collection has a prevalently European focus, yet contributions explore a range of trans-national spatial dimensions that exceed the boundaries of "Europe" and of European nation-states.

European Journal of Women's Studies, 2014

NORA. Nordic Journal of Feminist andGender Research, 2013

This piece considers moments of US sexual citizenship situating these in terms of LGBT campaigning groups’ actions, institutional reactions and broader public relations evident in the course of claiming and lamenting citizenship, community and diversity. In celebrating new queer presences, the absence of ‘others’ must also be considered: queer and feminist literatures on the politics of grief, loss and mourning have shown the ways that some lives are already lost to public/activist/institutional concern, representing an outsider status beyond community and citizenship (Butler, 2004; Haritaworn, 2010; Taylor, 2010). This piece considers the implications of this with regard to sexual citizenship. Recent policies in the US and UK context – such as the Civil Partnership Act (2004) and the repeal of US military policy ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ – have been conceptualised as a moment of coming forward, gaining a new public visibility and viable presence within a human rights framework. The success of ‘the world we have won’ (Weeks, 2007) within these new presences often works to re-create a dominant ‘we’, as a classed and racialised construction, neglecting the intersectional dimensions of sexual citizenship (Taylor et al., 2010). Such debates and their complex implications came to the fore around the recent Tyler Clementi suicide at a US campus following a suspected act of homophobia. This piece hopes to make broader resonances in relation to both institutional and activist responses to this event rather than to locate homophobia solely within the site discussed or on the bodies of the young people accused. The creation of broader publics, as called upon by different actors in the demand for citizenship, community and diversity, can be seen as contradictory, relying upon and re-creating privacy as the proper concern and place of civil engagements. This is witnessed in responses to different queer deaths and the affective relations – from ‘hate’ to ‘love’ – which are generated interpersonally and institutionally in pinpointing blame, in moving forwards and in securing rights, as a moment of loss and possible gain. I ask which lives are already lost to public concern, to community activism and institutional apprehension – this is significant to dis-junctures in diversity rhetorics and realities enacted in community claims for citizenship.

This chapter employs Iris Marion Young’s framework of two types of politics of difference – the structural inequality model and the societal cultural model – to unpack and analyse the ‘difference’ that is articulated in diversity politics. Application of Young’s framework uncovers the tendency to a static understanding of culture, with limited reference to the structural processes underlying social group formation and inadequate attention to intersections with other categories. In order to account for the shift of diversity politics to difference as a ‘resource’, Young’s work needs to be placed in relation to ‘difference-conscious neo-liberalism’ rather than a difference-blind liberalism’. Insights from studies on colonial cultural brokers can help demonstrate continuities in ‘domesticating’ difference for political and commercial ends, and show the continued relevance of Young’s account of normalising processes.

2021

EFRC now has a tradition of nearly 30 years. The topics debated and investigated at these conferences have included the relationship between Eastern and Western European feminist researchers (Ålborg, 1991), technoscience and technology (Graz, 1994), mobility and the institutionalisation of Women's, Feminist and Gender Studies (Coimbra, 1997), borders and policies (Bologna, 2000), post-communist feminism and the power relations between West and East (Lund, 2003), citizenship and multicultural contexts (Łódź, 2006), gendered cultures in knowledge and politics (Utrecht, 2009), the politics of location on a local as well as global scale (Budapest, 2012), and the challenges of intensified capitalism (Rovaniemi, 2015). The focus of the 10 th EFRC, entitled 'Difference, Diversity, Diffraction. Confronting Hegemonies and Dispossessions', was twofold. The terms 'difference', 'diversity' and 'diffraction' were chosen to emphasize the interdisciplinarity of the broad feminist field of feminist research and refer to a topic central to Gender Studies: the social construction of difference and inequality on the one hand, and the recognition of marginalised experiences and subject positions on the other. In the face of growing right-wing populist movements, anti-feminist and anti-queer backlashes, forced migration, austerity, and climate change, these concerns take on renewed relevance. 'Confronting hegemonies and dispossessions' was meant as a call to interrogate and challenge the current global situation in which economic, cultural, as well as knowledge hegemonies and social hierarchies create inequalities, unliveable environments, and precarious lives. Each EFRC conference has introduced innovations. For instance, the second installment expanded the scope of the conference series beyond European researchers. The third invited interdisciplinarity by crossing the boundaries between the humanities and the social and the natural sciences. The fourth included practitioners and policy makers. The fifth inaugurated a new stream on archives and documentation. During the sixth conference, possibilities for merging European feminist associations were discussed. As a result of this, ATGENDER, the European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation, was founded in 2009, bringing together the organisations ATHENA, AOIFE and WISE. Since then, ATGENDER has been organising the triannual EFRCs together with local partners. The 10th EFRC was organised in collaboration between ATGENDER, the German Gender Studies Association (Gender e.V.

2024

This open access book critically examines how discourses and policies target and exclude migrants and their families in Europe and North America along racial, gender and sexuality lines, and how these exclusions are experienced and resisted. Building on the influential notion of intersectional borderings, it delves deep into how these discourses converge and diverge, highlighting the underlying normative constructs of family, gender, and sexuality. First, it examines how radical-right and conservative political movements perpetuate exclusionary practices and how they become institutionalized in migration, welfare, and family policies. Second, it examines the dynamic responses they provoke—both resistance and reinforcement—among those affected in their everyday lives. Bringing together studies from political and social sciences, it offers a vital contribution to the expanding field of migrant family governance and exclusion and is essential for understanding the complex processes of exclusion and the movements that challenge and sustain them. It expands academic discussions on populism and the politics of exclusion by linking them to the politicization of intimacy and family life. With diverse case studies from Europe, North, and Central America, it appeals to students, academics, and policymakers, informing future mobilizations against discriminatory and exclusionary tendencies in politics and society.

DiGeSt. Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies, 2024

In this contribution to the roundtable, I reflect on the evolution of critical diversity studies, as part of the broader field of critical management and organization studies, from its origins in the 1990s to date. After reviewing its unique strengths in generating knowledge on the relation between difference and power, I discuss how the economic crisis of 2008 has transformed and radicalized this field of study. I conclude with a plead to engage more with the bourgeoning Marxist scholarship. Such engagement is not only essential to theorize the role of difference in organizing unequally in capitalism, but also to envision anti-capitalist struggles and a post-capitalist, more equal organization of the economy, work and life as a whole. What is critical diversity studies? Over the last decade, critical diversity studies as part of the broader critical management and organization studies has come to age (Prasad et al., 1997; Zanoni et al., 2010; Zanoni & Van Laer, 2024). The term 'critical' qualifies this scholarship as foregrounding power in the conceptualization of difference along gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, race and ethnicity, religion, language, age and class, to name only a few, as well as their intersections. Drawing on a wide variety of theories and conceptual vocabularies, critical diversity studies investigates the discursive, material, affective and institutional making and unmaking of such differences. Taking an explicitly non-positivist, non-essentialistic epistemological stance, it assumes that differences are not universally 'given', but rather social constructions produced through social practice in multiple ways across contexts and dynamically over time. This entails that differences remain inherently instable and contested. On the one hand, to become hegemonic and 'taken for granted', their specific meanings need to be continuously reaffirmed. On the other hand, precisely this necessity makes them susceptible of being more or less overtly disputed and transformed. Differences are understood not as characteristics of individuals, but rather as 'principles of organizing' work and life in unequal ways, which includes the unequal distribution of the symbolic and materials rewards attached to it (Benschop & Doorewaard, 1998; Nkomo, 1992). We draw on feminist theory, decolonial theory, queer theory, Marxist theory, critical discourse analysis, neo-materialist theory, and more to unpack how difference deeply imbues our understanding of what is work and what is not, which activity deserve to be paid and which should be carried out without compensation, what are essential