Gender Lunch

Gender Lunch is a recurring event that brings together researchers from across the University of Copenhagen for an informal lunch with an academic twist. Every second month, a different faculty acts as host, creating a rotating setting where diverse academic traditions and perspectives on gender can meet.

The aim of Gender Lunch is to provide space for interdisciplinary conversations about gender and diversity – both as research fields and as lived experiences in academia. Over a shared meal, one or more researchers introduce a current theme, ongoing research, an article, a project, or teaching practice in the field. This serves as a starting point for discussion and exchange of perspectives.

The event is open to all researchers and PhD students at UCPH with an interest in gender research and related topics.

Participation is free, but registration is required ahead of each lunch. Please bring your own lunch. Coffee and cake will be provided by the Coordination for Gender Research.

First Gender Lunch Presentations

• Presentation by Naja Dyrendom Graugaard
  Naja will present the project Birgijupmi – Bridging knowledge systems for inclusive, resilient and prosperous Arctic coastal futures.
  
  About the project
  This project explores Indigenous knowledge systems, epistemologies, and methodologies as they relate to life and sustainability in Arctic coastal communities. Birgejupmi is the Sámi word for sustainability, describing an Indigenous way of understanding and conceptualising sustainability in Sápmi.
  
  In the work package Coastscape Relationalities – Uncovering silenced knowledge systems and crafting a relational One Health approach for community resilience, reconciliation, and well-being, led by the University of Copenhagen, the relations between people, land, coast, body, and healing are examined. This includes research into Inuit terminologies that articulate these aspects of coastal life in the Arctic.
  
  For Gender Lunch, Naja will focus on the connections between land, body, and healing, and may also address the relevance of Indigenous feminism for this research.
  
  
• Presentation by Anton Juul
  Anton will present the article “Skriv med røvhullet” [“Write with the Asshole”]: Towards an Anal Poetics.
  
  

  About the article
  

  This article thinks male homoeroticism and homoerotic writing through the anus. Within a fallocentric, sexual hierarchy and culture, the anus is repeatedly associated with pas-sivity, negative feminisation and bodily and social debasement. Anal theorists, like Freud, Hochqenghem, Nguyen, Stockton and Allan, all interrogate and negotiate the anus’ negative connotations. Proposing the term ‘circumclusion’ (Adamczak 2022) – to encircle and en-velop – as a helpful term to describe anal intercourse from the ‘passive’ side, the article argues that the cultural theory of the anus splits the anus in two: into a good, circumclusive anus, thought to habour positive, utopian-like potentials for different, queer socialities and sexual arrangements, and a bad, passive anus, theorised as a threshold for psychic, bodily and social debasement and destruction. The article then turns to fiction for a comparative reading of the anal homoeroticism in the novels Techno (Jensby 2016) and Romeo & Seahorse (Lange 2022) to show how the meaning and value of the gay man’s anus is negotiated within the polarity of the good and the bad anus. More than a dichotomic splitting, the anus is shown to oscillate between good and bad, with different affective implications. Lastly, turning toward the novel Huden er det elastiske hylster, der omgiver hele legemet (Rasmussen 2011) as an instructive example, the article argues for an ‘anal poetics’, in which the writing itself tends toward debased ab-jection. Metatextually, however, the very form of the novel is conceptualised through the image of a circumclusive anus, enveloping the novel’s collage-like, intertextual writing.