Gender Studies Month (Opening event and a talk)

The seminar will be divided into two parts. The first part of the seminar will be the opening event of the Gender Studies Month and the second part will be a talk given by Prof. Brian King.

Title of the talk: Gender and Language Rearticulated: Biopower and Livability in Hong Kong
Abstract: This talk explores gender, language and biopolitics to illuminate the plight of intersex people while also reinforcing the complexity and importance of gender in society. I will argue that gender is not a ‘model’ that explains, but a contextualized process that always needs explanation. Biopower, in turn, is a way of explaining how power works in modern nation states. It refers to the subjugation and control of people not through direct coercion of individuals but rather by using institutions to build social practices of self-discipline into entire populations. In this paper's analysis, sociolinguistic meaning making is a site where biopower operates as a structural matrix (including gender), and linguistic practices and discourses are used to regulate and control the bodies of individuals and populations. It is also a site where practices of subjectivity formation and embodiment unfold, practices caught up in those structural processes yet giving clues to how gender as a lived and embodied experience and identity (i.e. its discursive manifestation) can rework and disrupt biopower.