Wekker, Gloria, Professor

By Katherine Harrison on 23 Apr | 0 comments

GEXcel project:

During her scholarship period at Linköping University, Wekker will be involved in putting together a book proposal which focuses on the ways that race, gender, sexuality and class intertwine in the Dutch “cultural archive” (Said 1993). I want to explore  the Dutch storehouse of a particular knowledge and structures of attitude and reference, (..) and, in Raymond Williams’ seminal phrase, structures of feeling, (..) which [entailed] (..) virtual unanimity that subject races should be ruled (Said 1993: 52).

I want to explore the forcefulness, passion and even aggression which various configurations of  race, gender, sexuality and class elicit in the Netherlands, while at the same time denial and disavowal are the order of the day.

Proposed title for seminar presentation:

The cultural Archive and Representations of black Women. On Ellen Ombre´s Negerjood in Moederland and Ayaan Hirsi Ali´s Infidel.

Biographical notes:

Prof. dr. Gloria Wekker is a social and cultural anthropologist (MA University of Amsterdam 1981; PhD UCLA, 1992), specializing in Gender Studies, African American Studies, and Caribbean Studies. She holds the IIAV-chair in Gender and Ethnicity in the Faculty of the Arts at Utrecht University and is the director of GEM, the Center of Expertise on Gender, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism in Higher Education, at the same university. Wekker locates herself as a representative of transnational, anti-racist, intersectional feminist theory and her research interests are in the following domains:

1. constructions of sexual subjectivity in the black Diaspora.
2. the history of the black, migrant and refugee womens’s movement in the Netherlands
3. gendered and ethnicized/ racialized knowledge systems in Dutch society, including the academy.
One of her recent publications is “The Politics of Passion; Women's sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora” (Columbia University Press, 2006), for which she won the Ruth Benedict Prize of the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists of American Anthropological Association (December 2007).