Intersecting Identities

We bring together specialists in the study of multiple, intersecting identities and work to develop methods and praxis that are interdisciplinary and cross-cutting. We research the ways in which identity is understood in and through language, and in historically and culturally specific contexts. Identities examined include gendered, sexual, religious, national identity markers, and the intersections between them. 

Some areas of expertise shared by those working in this stream include: transnational sexologies; embodied female subjectivity; the normative and non-normative in the spheres of embodiment and sexuality; constructions of sexuality in relation to national identity; gender and immigration; sexual violence; and historical and contemporary perceptions of “extremist” women.

Stream lead: Professor Kate Ince

Researchers

Academics

  • Hilary Brown researches transnational cultural history in the period 1500-1800. She examines in particular the role of women in European intellectual life, challenging some of the old assumptions about women as marginalised and insignificant and contributing to cross-discipline debates about gender as a category of analysis.  
  • Anissa Daoudi is currently working on the project Sexual Violence against Women in Algeria: narratives, translations, languages. The project explores the complex intersection between language, translation studies and literature related to violence in contemporary Algeria.
  • Lisa Downing is a specialist in interdisciplinary sexuality and gender studies, critical theory, and the history of diagnostic and cultural concepts.
  • Elliot Evans researches 20th and 21st Century literature, visual art and theory, particularly the intersections of feminist, queer and transgender theories. Their work has focused on questions of the body, gender and sexuality.
  • Kate Ince is a specialist in French cinema, women’s art and cinema, feminist philosophy and the (feminist) philosophy of art/film.
  • Katharina Karcher’s research focuses on political protest, violence and terrorism. In this context, she is particularly interested in the intersections of gender, (dis)ability, race, class, and political ideology.
  • Charlotte Ross’s research explores discursive constructions of gender and sexuality. Much of her writing focuses on Italian culture but she has recently begun to work in a comparative vein.
  • Lorraine Ryan's research focuses on the relationship between gender and memory and immigration in Contemporary Spain. She has also explored representations of masculinity in Contemporary Spanish Culture.

Major publications

Projects

Distinguished visiting speakers

Our invited distinguished visiting speakers who have delivered lectures on their cutting-edge projects, carried out workshops with Stream colleagues presenting their work, and given masterclasses to PG students include:

  • Professor Paul Julian Smith (CUNY, USA)
  • Professor Emma Wilson (Cambridge)
  • Professor Tim Dean (Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA)
  • Professor Alain Giami (INSERM, Paris, France).
  • Professor Rosalind Galt (Kings College London, forthcoming in April 2021)

Guests from other sectors working with UoB Stream colleagues on Impact-related activities have included:

  • psychotherapist, Clark Baim, who works with language and labels in therapy with sexual minorities,
  • artist Navine G. Khan Dossos, partner in Downing’s work on (S)extremism.

“Intersecting Identities” researchers have strong links with the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and with individual researchers in Sexuality and Gender at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), USA. Stream members will work with researchers at these UoB international partner institutions on a project on consent and #metoo in a range of cultural contexts.

Doctoral researchers

  • Yiran Ai: What Makes a Film Feminist?: Gender Perspectives of Directors of Westernised and Hong Kong Cinema (1990-2000)
  • Maria Elena Alampi, The Economic Crisis on the Big Screen: the Italian Era of Precarity.
  • Sarah Alshamran, Analysing “Feminist-Political” Discourse in Translated Novels After the Arab Spring
  • Lissia Amach: The role of Myth in the Work of Claude Cahun.
  • Simon Clewes, Happily Never After: Male-Male Desire and Love in the Writing of William Godwin and his Circle
  • Maria Del Buono, An inter-medial dialogue between cinema and its posters Italy 1945-1979.
  • Kinga Erzepki: The Representation of Non-binary Characters on US television.
  • Valeria Floris, Analysing Gender and Sexuality in Slash Fanfiction: A Comparative Study between Anglophone and Italian Literature.
  • Abby Fox, Dita goes to Disneyland: understanding pin-up culture with Michel Foucault and Johan Huizinga
  • Eleanor Hedger, Singing in the Face of Death: Soundscapes of Conflict and Punishment in Reformation England
  • Phillip McGuinness: Female autonomy in 1950s Spanish fiction.
  • Katie Masters, Putting The ‘Social’ In ‘Social Anxiety Disorder’: Exploring Women’s Experiences From A Feminist An Anti-Psychiatry Perspective
  • Gurbax Matoo, Mothers or Monsters: Social Work Interventions for White British and South-Asian Women who Kill Their Children
  • Frankie Morgan, Social Media and the Visual Culture and Fourth Wave Feminism.
  • Abbey Rees-Hales, (S)Ex-Libris: Women Artists and the Trade in Erotic Illustrated Books in Europe and the United States, c. 1914-1934
  • Chris Ryder, The Use of Gender Stereotypes in ISIS Propaganda
  • Azadeh Sarjooghian, Identity and Gender Stereotypes: The Representation of Muslim Men’s and Women’s Bodies in Contemporary Middle Eastern Art
  • Elisa Saturno Paasche, Gender and impegno in the Films of Nino Manfredi.
  • Daisy Savage, Decolonial Feminism and the Novels of Nina Bouraoui
  • Abra Preston-Roberts, “I was trying to save you!” Trauma and Sacrificial Motherhood in Twenty-First Century Horror Film
  • Anna Lisa Somma, Donna con donna (Woman with Woman): Representations of Female-Female desire in Early Modern Italian Literature.
  • Panagiota Vogiatzi, Representations of Queer Women in French and Greek Literature (1880-1940). A Comparative Reading.

Find out more

 

OUR RESEARCHERS TALK ABOUT THEIR WORK:

Gender and Sexuality in French writing, art and activism - Elliot Evans
Violence against women: narratives, translations and languages - Anissa Daoudi