This article offers a reflection on the current state of affairs regarding sexuality studies in general and the representation of non-heterosexual women in particular in contemporary academia and feminisms. As a lesbian scholar based in Poland, I am attempting to establish a separate lesbian-studies discourse in the Polish academia on the one hand, and encourage a great dose of interdisciplinarity in moving towards re-adjusted and re-defined lesbian feminisms on the other. Having defended my doctoral dissertation, I am going to re-visit and summarise one of its parts, namely the question of inadequacies of contemporary gender studies. Although the overall character of my activity can be situated within the sociology of sexuality, I tend to conceptualise the problems in question through the prism of sociology of knowledge and human geography, and especially the branches of feminist geography and geographies of sexualities. Altogether, I am going to briefly look into several contemporary gender and/or women’s studies programmes in Poland in order to show both their incapacity to deal with female sexuality and, as a consequence, their erasure of lesbianity. Needless to say, the brief analysis herein is merely the start of the discussion as it offers only a sample of exploratory efforts with regard to the question of academic feminisms, but it is one that reveals some alarming tendencies.
The article focuses on the relationship between space and sexuality, phenomena rarely studied together in the Czech social sciences. I use heteronormativity to describe the power polarization of largely socially constructed institutionalized relations between various sexualities. These polarizations are also inherently spatial, thus geographical phenomena. First, I focus on the discussion of various theoretical standpoints linked with foundations of heteronormativity. Secondly, I critically rethink the linear view of non-heterosexual identity development and discuss non-linear alternatives of ‘passing’ and sexual ‘closetedness’. I then incorporate this into the contextual model of sexual-identity negotiation. Thirdly, I use this model for understanding the spatial dynamics of heteronormativity and connected levels of non-heterosexuals’ comfort in particular spaces. Finally, by utilizing a rarely used visual methodology conducted on a sample of 1,589 Czech non-heterosexuals I focus on measuring the ‘perceived levels of heteronormativity’ in selected spaces. Results were translated into an ‘index of presumed spatial heteronormativity’ allowing for better understanding the everyday spatial negotiations of non-heterosexual identities.
The article presents the contemporary feminist stream of new materialism, and compares and contracts it with the linguistic branch of poststructuralism which has been criticized by new materialism for neglecting matter. The paper first discusses points of departure these two streams share, specifically, a critique of Western metaphysics, and in particular the fundamental interrogation of dualities and the idea of a stable inner essence in Western thought. Consequently, the article shortly introduces the starting points of new materialism and presents Judith Butler’s ideas on matter which are pivotal for the comparison that follows. The comparison of the two streams concentrates on the following issues: ontology, power, the abject, difference, subject and embodiment. The article stresses strong and weak points of both the streams and presents them as complementary rather than contradictory approaches.
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