Ulrika Dahl, LU alum, will be speaking in Steitz Hall 202 on Thursday, November 3rd at 4:30 PM.

The title of the talk is “White gloves, feminist fists: 1950s vintage and the politics of race and nation in contemporary femme figurations”.

Abstract:
Taking feminine fashion seriously and drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Australia, the US and the UK, this paper asks how the cultural politics of race and nation manifest in contemporary queer femme movements, performances and aesthetic practices. Examining the icons, symbols and aesthetics used in archival activism (Danbolt 2009) aimed at queer visibility, it hones in on the increasingly popular mid-century vintage look as simultaneously reflective of a larger cultural imaginary of gendered nostalgia and an embodiment of femme-inist history. Centrally, this paper considers how the love of vintage is tied to a politics of whiteness that both challenges and reproduces imperialism and nationalism and what the implications might be for queer and femme-inist movements.

BIO:

Ulrika Dahl ’94 is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden and a femme-inist writer active within Scandinavian queer and feminist debate. A magna cum laude graduate in anthropology and gender studies, Ulrika earned her Ph.D. in anthropology and women’s studies from UC Santa Cruz in 2004. Her research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren foundation for anthropological research, The Baltic Sea Foundation, The Bank of Sweden’s Tercentenary Fund and the Swedish foundation for international cooperation in higher education and research and she has taught and lectured widely in Scandinavia, Europe, the US and Australia.

Ulrika’s interdisciplinary work is informed by European postcolonial and feminist ethnography, queer and critical race feminist theories and driven by a commitment to methodologies for social change. Her dissertation, Progressive women, Traditional Men was an ethnographic account of the gendered politics of regional identity, European integration, and late modern knowledge formations in the rural northern periphery of the EU where she grew up. Among her publications are the widely reviewed book Femmes of Power: Exploding Queer Femininities (with visual artist Del LaGrace Volcano, Serpent’s Tail 2008) and numerous articles on femme figurations, femininity and feminist theory, fashion and queer and lesbian community making. She has also written about homophobia and hate crimes, queer reproductive politics, eating disorderliness and recently, a foreword to a translation of the work of Sara Ahmed on the hegemony of whiteness into Swedish (Vithetens Hegemoni Tankekraft förlag 2011). She is now completing a joint book project on Nordic gender studies with colleagues Ulla Manns and Marianne Liljeström entitled Feminism Translated: The (Re)making of Nordic Women’s/Gender Studies 1975-2005. Ulrika is also senior editor of the Nordic glbtq studies journal lambda Nordica and serves on the advisory board of several academic and cultural journals, including Bang, Tidskrift för Genusvetenskap and The Journal of Somatechnics. In the fall of 2011, Ulrika is a Fulbright Hildeman Fellow and visiting professor in Scandinavian Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota.