Seminars

A seminar "The History of Feminism in the Academy and the Futures of Gender Studies" [2010-10-05]

5 October 2010 at Vilnius university was orgamized prof. Sidonie Smith, University of Michigan, USA public seminar "The History of Feminism in the Academy and the Futures of Gender Studies". With reference to the field of women's life writing, this presentation briefly surveys the diverse strands of feminist theory from the 1970s to 2000. It then explores recent projects involving women's life writing that point to possible futures for transnational feminist alliances and knowledge production.

It concludes that, although feminism has become commodified in new ways under global capitalism, it can be energized and adaptively reoriented by acts of personal narration.  As these domains of life story production intervene to theorize the contested grounds of experience and identity, they indicate how contemporary feminism, in Ella Shohat's words, continues to be "a polysemic site of contradictory positionalities."