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About the seminars
Jenny Björklund has been awarded the Vilnius University Teaching and Learning Internationalisation Initiatives funding for the initiative Gender and Motherhood Studies and Research in the Baltic Sea Region. As part of this initiative in collaboration with the Horizon 2020 project MotherNet, she will deliver seminars to BA and MA students, of the Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University (in English and Swedish), will give a public lecture entitled Runaway Moms: Mothers Who Leave their Families in the Twenty-First Century, and will consult BA and MA students of the Faculty of Philology, on their final theses.
About the public lecture
What does it mean that so many mothers leave their families in twenty-first-century Swedish literature? The lecture takes its point of departure in this question and explores how novels about mothers who leave can be understood as queer resistance against Swedish-branded ideals of parenthood, family, and reproduction. The public lecture will be streamed online.
About the speaker
Jenny Björklund is a Professor of Gender Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her current research deals with cultural representations of in/voluntary childlessness, and reproductive decision-making and climate change. Her books include Maternal Abandonment and Queer Resistance in Twenty-First-Century Swedish Literature (2021) and Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair (2014). Her work has also appeared in Social Science and Medicine, Women’s Studies, Scandinavian Studies, and Contemporary Women’s Writing.
| November 29, 15:00, Room 92, Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University | Feminist and Queer Reading Methods (to students of the Faculty of Philology) Readings: Benedictsson, Victoria. (1885) 2011. Money. Translated by Sara Death. London: Norvik Press, pp. 129–40. Björklund, Jenny. 2018. “Editorial: Queer Readings/Reading the Queer.” lambda nordica 23 (1–2): 7–15. |
| November 30, 13:00, Greimas room (111), Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University | Feminist and Queer Reading Methods (to MA students of Literature and Intermedial studies) Readings: Björklund, Jenny, and Ann-Sofie Lönngren. 2020. “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Queer Reading Strategies, Swedish Literature, and Historical (In)visibility.” Scandinavian Studies 92 (2): 196–228. Butler, Octavia E. (1984) 1996. “Bloodchild”. In Bloodchild and Other Stories, 3–32. New York: Seven Stories Press. Halberstam, Judith “Jack”. 2007. “Forgetting Family: Queer Alternatives to Oedipal Relations.” In A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, edited by George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, 315–24. Oxford: Blackwell. |
| November 30, 15:00, 314 B room, Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University | *Att tillämpa feministiska och queera läsmetoder (to BA students of Scandinavian studies) Litteratur: Holmqvist, Ninni. (1995) 2010. “Kostym.” In Kostym, 51–59. Stockholm: Norstedts. *Lecture will be held in Swedish! |
| December 1, 16:00, 402 Room (TSPMI Conference room, Vokiečių street, 10) | Public lecture Runaway Moms: Mothers Who Leave their Families The lecture is a part of the Vilnius University Gender Research seminar series and is co-organized by the research group Re-thinking Motherhood from the Faculty of Philology and the Feminist Policy and Social Critique research group from the Institute of International Relations and Political Science The lecture will be streamed on TSPMI Facebook page |
| December 2, 11:00, 108 Room, Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University | Lecture consultation on motherhood research methods (to all students of the Faculty of Philology, Vilnius university) |
To get the readings, please contact the MotherNet project coordinator Eglė Kačkutė-Hagan: egle.kackute-hagan@flf.vu.lt
The visit of Prof. Jenny Björklund is a part of the project “Developing a New Network of Researchers on Contemporary European Motherhood (MotherNet)”. This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 952366.
