Refusing Intersectionality: Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Cases in Academic Institutions

The Maison Suger is pleased to invite you to the seminar "Refusing Intersectionality: Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Cases in Academic Institutions". The researcher in residence, Shivani Gupta, will present her research.

Shivani Gupta is a feminist anthropologist interested in examining how everyday gendered experiences, in urban settings, are articulated and negotiated by gender minorities through precepts of violence, surveillance, mobilities, fear, morality, and honor rooted in social structures. She uses ethnographic, feminist and phenomenology approaches to investigate social issues of gender, sexuality, violence, urbanism, spatiality, subversions, everyday, and pedagogy. She received her PhD from the department of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, following an MA from Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai, India) and a BA (Honours) in Political Science from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University (India). Prior to joining NUS College as a lecturer, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Communications and New Media department, at NUS, on a project that investigated campus sexual violence (including technology-facilitated) in Singapore.

Leda Perez is a professor of the Social and Political Science Department at the Universidad del Pacifico in Lima, Peru. Her research in Latin America focuses on the intersection of social and labor rights with gender, ethnicity/race, migration, and class. She is interested in the care economy, paid domestic workers and other gendered labor regimes. Raised in the United States by her Cuban immigrant parents, she has lived in Peru for almost 20 years.

The project

"In recent years, the notion of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) has become well-known even when there is hesitancy, and most often refusal, to acknowledge such a phenomenon in our immediate environments. The resistance to recognize the ways and forms in which SBGV comes about is present in institutions across the board, but it’s worryingly so in academic institutions. Academic institutions as sites of learning and future development of students and their staff are assumed to be spaces that people from varied backgrounds inhabit, primarily focusing on consumption and dissemination of knowledge. Thus, numerous vulnerabilities operate simultaneously, underpinned by layered structures of power. These vulnerabilities are determined by age, class, gender, sexuality, race, and religion, which bring into existence the discourse on situated lived and embodied experiences of violence that defy the universalizing ways in which bodies within institutional settings are perceived. Therefore, in this talk, I will examine how academic institutions assess and manage cases of SGBV, by analyzing a few cases and interviews with victims/survivors,  that are negligent of individuals’ social and lived realities by discounting the role intersectionality plays in the occurrence and articulation of violence. This in turn hampers the resolution of cases by leaving victims/survivors feeling further traumatized, victimized, and blamed. By using intersectionality as a unit of analysis, I will argue that most cases are often mismanaged or discarded because institutions fear their reputations, thereby discounting the needs of the victims/survivors, especially those further marginalized by structural inequalities."

Speakers

• Shivani Gupta : feminist anthropologist, professor at National University of Singapore (NUS)
• Leda Perez : professor of the Social and Political Science at the Universidad del Pacifico in Lima, Peru