Intimate terror: Violence, generational power and children’s subjectivities – a feminist issue?

April 20, 2023 | 13:30 h - 14:30 h

Abstract:

The presentation is based on a paper that considers the experiences and subjectivities of children in conflictual and violent contexts, focusing particularly on interpersonal relations in the domestic sphere and on institutional contexts. It builds on feminist research on ‘intimate terror‘ (Pain 2014) to ask how children’s subjectivities and understandings of interpersonal relationships are impacted by violent relations of power in domestic and institutional contexts. Drawing on interviews conducted in Leipzig in 2014/15 and on memory stories collected by the Re-Collect/Re-Connect project on Cold War childhoods, it asks how survivors of child abuse make sense of violence and how they reflect on embodiment, identities, generational positionings, (the limits of) agency in violent domestic contexts and its intersections with political and institutional power. The paper further brings a feminist lense to the issue, asking what feminist scholarship can contribute to research on child abuse and vice versa.

About the speaker: 

Prof. Dr. Kathrin Hörschelmann holds a chair in Cultural Geography, University of Bonn, Institute of Geography since 2020. Her key research interests are, Critical and Feminist Security Studies, Citizenship and Participation, Geographies of Childhood and Youth, Social and Cultural Change in Postsocialist Societies, Cultural Geographies of Migration and Social Transformation, and Emotional Geographies. Her latest publication is ‘Childhood is a foreign country? Ethics in socio-spatial childhood research as a question of ‘how’ and ‘what’’.