Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Volume 21, Issue 4, 2019

In this paper I make an analysis of the dominant ideas on love in Belgian society, based on the narratives of men and women in (predominantly heterosexual) non-monogamous relationships. The narratives of these men and women show that although their practices do not conform to the ideal of the monogamous couple relationship, they often reproduce the gendered power relations inherent in the romantic love complex, thereby privileging the doctrine of detached individualism and invulnerability over notions of responsibility and care. Building on feminist critiques of the romantic love complex, this paper questions the subversive potential of these non-monogamous lifestyles as they seemingly fail to adequately challenge underlying patriarchal structures and mechanisms. The paper proposes an ethics of intersubjective vulnerability, which is defined by both a critical disposition and responsiveness to our own vulnerability and the vulnerability of others, as a prerequisite for radically rethinking love.

This paper reports on a small-scale case study using an intersectional approach that reflects on sense of place in first-generation Turkish migrant women who migrated to Belgium in the 1970s and who live in Antwerp 2060 (Belgium). It shows how migrant women have taken on efforts to re-enact and renegotiate places in search of interpersonal connection within their new environment. The case study focuses on three significant time periods in the life cycle of the women: before migration, in the extended arrival period, and today. It is empirically supported by semi-structured personal interviews covering place-related life stories situated at the intersection of four social identity categories, i.e. age, gender, socio-economic background, and culture. The analysis illustrates how the benefit of economic migration for these migrant women comes with the sacrifice of social connectedness, a consequence of their ‘deduplicated’ feeling of belonging.

Work is one of the main areas of discrimination against trans people, both in Belgium and the European Union as a whole. This fact points to the inseparability of symbolic and material aspects in discrimination and exclusion. In this sense, the creation and justification of differences and hierarchies become essential to understand work discrimination. Although gender analyses of work and the economy abound, these usually rely on unalterable and dichotomous gender categories. In this paper, we argue that, because of the destabilisation of the categories that it entails, ‘trans-inquiring’ is a fruitful critical approach to examine common-sense notions about gender and sexuality at work. Our objective is to identify workers’ discourses about ‘difference’ related to gender issues at work and the implications for the inclusion/exclusion of trans people. Our corpus consisted of the transcriptions of five group interviews carried out with co-workers from five work organisations in Brussels. The analysis was carried out using a discursive psychology approach through the identification of rhetorical devices and interpretative repertoires. Diverse and often contradictory discourses were identified. These contradictory discourses carry out a rhetorical work by setting a distinction between (gender and sexuality) indifference, (useful) diversity, and (unacceptable) difference. This distinction has the function of both expressing an adherence to equality principles while at the same time maintaining hegemonic views on gender and sexuality in the workplace – namely cisgenderism, sexism, and heteronormativity – and denying discrimination against trans people, women, and homosexual people.

In July 2016, Norway enacted a law that allows for one to determine one’s juridical gender without the previously required medical sterilisation. Widely heralded as a significant step toward complete gender equality, this was seen by many as finally resulting in legal equality for those who are trans. However, the law’s potential to empower the trans movement may be quite limited, given the lack of options outside the male/female binary and the absence of improved access to gender-confirming medical technologies. Such limitations, this article argues, preclude the law from either sufficiently addressing the needs of many transpeople or meaningfully challenging prevailing gender norms. How, then, can the law be celebrated as a landmark achievement for trans rights in Norway? This article seeks to explain the apparent contradiction by considering the law’s founding principles as they apply to the trans political landscape in Norway, in order to illustrate how the law’s inception and application have been informed by particular interpretations of identity, gender, and sex. Moreover, it analyses the potential impact of the law’s shortcomings on the people for whom it was meant to represent, using a queer analytical approach to understand how the law can empower some trans whilst further marginalising others.