First seminar
Spaces of Agency: Alliances, Subversions, and Choices

October 30th, 2024
To join the seminar, please click here.

Akansha Rai
University of Hydebarad
Mapping Trajectories Among Women Workers from Marginalised Artisan Communities in Northern India.
The paper attempts to understand the nature of the switch in work priorities post-pandemic among women belonging to marginalised artisan communities of Northern India. The paper unfolds over three meticulously structured sections. Firstly, it lays a comprehensive foundation by analysing secondary sources to shed light on the nuances of the Indian labour market. This section delves into understanding non-farm household enterprises as significant avenues for self-employment for marginalised women workers. It explores their engagement in work choices and examines whether self-employment emerges from entrepreneurial ambition or as a necessity due to the lack of formal employment opportunities in the area. The subsequent section sheds light on the experiences of female workers, particularly how the pandemic has forced them to switch jobs and the resulting instability in their work lives. The study examines women's adeptness at manoeuvring through entrenched societal norms and their ongoing struggle to balance the realms of production and social reproduction. Empirical insights for the analysis are drawn from rich, qualitative data gathered through semi-structured interviews and open-ended conversations with the women and their spouses.

Eli S.
Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg
The Lesbian Sublime in 'Portrait of a Lady on Fire' (2019) and 'Ammonite' (2020).
This paper explores the image of the sublime in Contemporary Lesbian Cinema where lesbian bodies are mainly portrayed within the exterior and un-domestic spaces of Nature such as the ocean, coast, seaside, cave, and castle. The most common approach to the ‘Sublime’ is its immediate association with 18th and early 19th-century romanticism. Distinguishing the experience of the sublime and the beautiful, the conventional approaches, implicitly gender the terms where the sublime becomes “associated with an experience of masculine empowerment; its contrasting term, the beautiful, [becomes] associated with an experience of feminine nurturance, love, and sensuous relaxation” (Mellor 1993, 85). In this article, I argue that Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Celine Sciamma 2019) and Ammonite (Francis Lee, 2020) set the stories in sceneries such as the coastline, cave, castle, and other undomesticated spaces in nature, conventionally known as sublime spaces, and subsequently transform the traditional masculine image of the sublime into the lesbian sublime. In Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Ammonite similar to the Romantics who escaped to nature to promote and safeguard their individuality, the sublime in the films elevates lesbians’ subjectivity and nurtures lesbian desire. The lesbian sublime hand-picks the features of the sublime defined by the Romantics to unfold the lesbian desire within the sublime spaces in the films.

Emma Thiebaut
Université Paris Cité
Nineteenth-Century Zoopoetics: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and the Sapphic Eroticism of Pussies.
There is a long history of intimate alliances between queer women and cats. In this paper, I wish to explore this history by reading the works and letters of the once very popular American author Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) through the prism of queer theory, animal studies and feminist methodology. For decades of her life, Freeman lived with a childhood friend, Mary Wales, and quite a few cats, in what I will call after Donna Haraway a queer and "interspecies mess”. While little remains of what Freeman may have said about Wales, or about her possible romantic affection for other women, we can read the love she expressed for cats in quite a few short stories, letters and interviews—and discover proto-lesbian affections in Freeman’s deft weaving together of interspecies love and queer desire. Freeman’s stories and letters served for her as a space of experimentation for the expression and identification of queer feelings and queer affective identities, even allowing her to develop a material-semiotic poiesis inspired by the feline subjectivity of her closest feline companions. This very peculiar poiesis might, I will argue, pave the way for a true queer and interspecies redistribution of communicative agency.