New Work in Gender and Sexuality Studies

InterGen PhD research seminar

Join us for an afternoon seminar showcasing current research from three PhD scholars in the InterGen network.

Through three short presentations, we will encounter new work spanning Nordic intellectual history, trans contemporary art and queer memory practices. Across different historical periods, geographical contexts and forms of cultural production, the presentations raise questions about gender, representation, knowledge, archives and the possibilities of recovering or producing alternative histories.

Each speaker will present for approximately 20 minutes, followed by time for questions, comments and collective discussion of the projects. The seminar is intended as an informal space for sharing work in progress, exchanging ideas and getting to know each other across the network.

The seminar is in English.

Coffee and cake will be served.

Presentations

Bodil Hvass Kjems (COMM): Proto-feminism in the Nordic Enlightenment: Renegotiating Female Intellectual Identity

This presentation introduces Bodil Hvass Kjems’ PhD project on Proto-feminism in the Nordic Enlightenment, focusing on Otto Sperling the Younger (1634–1715), author of the largest known catalogue of learned women, De foeminis doctis.

Through his work, a partly erased and partly forgotten history emerges: that of learned women navigating the male-coded and exclusionary epistemic norms of Scandinavia. Kjems argues that Sperling can be understood as a proto-feminist insofar as he facilitated and encouraged learned women, particularly Cille Gad, Anne Margrethe Quitzow and Sophia Elisabeth Brenner, to pursue and develop intellectual identities that involved transgressing conventional ideals of female virtue.

Tais Terletskaja (IKK): The Impasse of (Trans) Representation in Art and Research

This presentation explores negotiations over the terms of representation among artists who either claim, or are claimed by, the categories “trans” and “transgender”. These negotiations serve as an entry point for thinking more broadly about representation and positionality in both art and research.

The presentation takes its point of departure in Terletskaja’s recently defended PhD dissertation, Troubling the Lines: Trans Contemporary Art and Cultural Production and the Impasse of Representation (University of Copenhagen, 2025). The dissertation examines the contradictions surrounding trans visibility in a Westernized cultural sphere. These contradictions, Terletskaja argues, require simultaneous attention to the affirmation and refusal of embodied trans identity within a dominant visual culture that either violently disallows gender deviance or fetishistically instrumentalizes its representation

María Emilia Muñoz (NorS): Activism as an Alternative Archival Practice: Queer Memory Work in Catania

María Emilia Muñoz will present her PhD project on the memory work undertaken by the NGO Arcigay Catania. The presentation explores how the organisation’s activities can be understood as a form of alternative archival practice in a city without a formal queer archive. By examining activism as a practice of collecting, preserving, circulating and producing queer memory, the project asks how such activities compensate for the absence of an institutional archive and what effects they may have on the local LGBTQIA+ community.