Tuula Juvonen | Lesboratories, Or On The Productivity of Material Intra-Actions

By Tuula Juvonen, University of Tampere Date: Mon 28 Nov 2016 Time: 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm Location: Rm813, 8/F, The Jockey Club Tower, HKU

Lesbian communities are often seen as an unproblematic point of departure for empirical research, as if they would have always already been there, stable entities, ready to be studied. In my paper I want to argue that lesbian communities should rather be conceptualized as “lesboratories”, as apparatuses, which enable the constant state of becoming both for the community itself, and those lesbian subjectivities which both create it and emerge out of its affective resonances.

Such an approach, which benefits from the theoretical work of Karen Barad (1996) and Rainer Mühlhoff (2015), is particularly productive when studying the emerging lesbian communities, in this case in Finland of the 1980s. In the paper I explore how lesbian subjectivities started to emerge from the intra-actions of gendered bodies that were taking place in…