Untitled Document

Newsletter 32

News from National Committees

SWITZERLAND

CONFERENCE

In 1996, the Swiss Society for Gender Studies/Women's Studies was founded to support interdisciplinary research on gender relationship and to promote the knowledge on such research. Thus, one of the Society's main aims is to present important results of national and international gender research to Swiss academic audiences.

To do so, it organized BodyConcepts as an interdisciplinary and international conference, held at the University of Basle on March 16th and 17th 2001. The conference focused from different perspectives on a central paradigm of recent gender research - the body. A number of questions were considered: How is the body (its parts, its fragments) perceived, how is it represented aesthetically, and how is it put into academic discourse? Both literal and symbolically indirect meanings of corporeality were at the center of these investigations.

The aims of the conference were manifold: to map out and present the permanent challenge of disciplinary boundaries which has been part of gender studies ever since its inception; to bring into contact the discourse of cultural studies and life science; to combine symbolic and material strands of discussion, and, to highlight the competitive yet productive co-existence of academic research and emancipatory politics.

Organized by the two historians Claudia Opitz (Basel) and Béatrice Ziegler (Zürich) and the two literary critics Franziska Frei Gerlach (Basel) and Annette Kreis-Schinck (Heidelberg), the conference included three key speakers: Christina von Braun (Berlin) who addressed the question of Christian and Jewish sexuality; Britta Schinzel (Freiburg) who presented the technical world of computer based visualizations in life science; and Gabriele Brandstetter (Basel) who analyzed the staging of gender and the body concepts in science and art.

The conference also included 10 workshops in which 30 national and international speakers approached the bodyconcepts from the various angles mentioned above.

-compiled by Catherine Bosshart and Annette Kreis-Schinck