Date : 2019-09-11

Venue : Room 109, Chen Kou Bun Building, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Wednesday Gender Seminar Fall 2019
The performative effects of diagnosis: thinking gender, sexuality, and intimacy through diagnostic logics and politics

Date:  11 Sept 2019 (Wed)

Time: 12:30pm – 2pm

Venue: Room 109, Chen Kou Bun Building, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Speaker: Dr. Sebastian Mohr, Senior Lecturer of Gender Studies and Director of the Centre for Gender Studies, Karlstad University, Sweden.

Moderator: Prof. Jing SONG, Assistant Professor, Gender Studies Programme, CUHK.

Abstract:

In this presentation, I suggest the performative effects of diagnosis as an analytical tool to explore the transformations in people’s intimate lives that the advent of diagnosis brings with it. As such an analytical term, I understand the performative effects of diagnosis to describe trajectories or possibilities in people’s intimate lives that emerge in the interplay between a person’s intimate sense of self, that is, their gendered and sexualed self-perceptions, and the logics and norms contained in medical diagnoses. I develop this term in the context of ethnographic research on Danish war veterans’ understandings of and experiences with intimacy and extrapolate it conceptually through scholarship in feminist theory, trans studies, STS, and medical anthropology and sociology. The argument that I make throughout is that the performative effects of diagnosis provide an analytical space in which transformations in people’s intimate lives can be explored without a foreclosure about the normative dimensions of these transformations. In that sense, rather than asking how biopolitical and cis- and heteronormative normalcy constitutes itself, the performative effects of diagnosis provide the opportunity to explore how these dimensions are (re)configured and (un)done in and through medicalized intimacies.

Speaker’s Biography:

Sebastian Mohr is senior lecturer of gender studies and Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at Karlstad University. During the fall of 2019, Sebastian is visiting scholar at the Gender Studies Program at CUHK. Sebastian is interested in how we become subjects with a sense of self, identity, and belonging and what role gender, sexuality, and intimacy play thereby. He attends to this interplay ethnographically in the areas of gender equality, military masculinities, digital health and (reproductive) health technologies as well as sexological knowledge production. Sebastian is the author of Being a Sperm Donor: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Biosociality in Denmark (Berghahn, 2018).

Language: English

Registration: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=7991474