RU Logo 2023
School of Arts and Sciences
Institute for Research on Women
  • rutgers.edu
  • SAS
  • Search People
  • Search Website
Institute for Research on Women | The School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

RU Logo 2023
Institute for Research on Women

    • About IRW
    • Annual Report
    • Get Involved
    • Join Email List
    • Staff
    • Executive Committee
    • Seminar Fellows
    • Visiting Scholars
  • Programs
    • Distinguished Lecture Series
    • Seminar
    • Learning Community
    • Working Groups
    • Conferences
    • Professional Development
  • Publications
    • Rejoinder Journal
    • Featured Books
    • Working Papers Archive
    • Newsletters Archive
    • Mnemosyne Podcast
    • Featured News
    • Calendar
    • Events
    • Events Archive
  • Donate
  • Contact

Programs

  • Distinguished Lecture Series
    • Lecture Series Archive
    • Current Lecture Series
  • Seminar
    • Seminar Archive
  • Learning Community
  • Working Groups
  • Conferences
    • Poverty and Sexuality
    • Marking Time
    • Trans Politics
    • Feminist Fantasies
    • Feeling Democracy
  • Professional Development

Quick Links

2023-2024 Seminar Schedule

2023-2024 Seminar Fellows

2024-2025 Seminar Call

Seminar FAQ

Seminar Archive

 

IRW Seminar

2023-2024 IRW Seminar

seminar3

Possession

Possession is a complex phenomenon that takes multiple forms, both material (land, money, bodies) and incorporeal (knowledge, reputation, lineage). It conveys a variety of meanings (economic, emotional, legal, medical, political, spiritual, sexual, territorial). It implies a gendered relationship of power between possessor and possessed. Historically, societies have understood children, women, queer people, and men from subordinated classes, castes, races, and religions to be particularly susceptible to possession: the condition of being controlled, seized, and owned as property, as well as the state of being dominated or inhabited by a spirit. Possessed people are often ascribed the status and condition of femininity, incapacity, vulnerability, and/or dependency.

Yet, possession in its religious connotation also means to invoke, access, and channel power and authority that the possessed are otherwise denied. The very state of being controlled by a divine or otherworldly force—of losing the autonomous self and submitting to the will of another—allows the possessed, if only temporarily, to transgress prescriptive norms and categories, express forbidden desires, and engage in what are often viewed as deviant and subversive patterns of social behavior and relations. As an act of communicating with the immaterial world, spirit possession also sustains relations and communities across temporal boundaries, reanimating and reclaiming ties to and memories of human and nonhuman kin. As such, possession is a potent site in which to challenge the logic of secular modernity, heteropatriarchy, and the (neo)liberalism of individualism and private ownership. Possession is a modality of disempowerment, but potentially of empowerment and refusal too.

Over the last decade, a growing body of literature has emerged on the cultures, histories, landscapes, laws, economies, and politics of dispossession that interrogates racial capitalist, (neo)colonial, and heteropatriarchal modes of accumulation by dispossession. The subject of possession has not become a widespread subject of feminist, queer scholarship in the way that dispossession has. This seminar will explore feminist and queer frameworks for analyzing and theorizing possession and its intersectional dynamics. How might feminist and queer analyses of possession complement and complicate existing understandings of dispossession and how it ought to be studied and redressed? How might feminist and queer approaches to possession diverge?

 

2023-2024 IRW Seminar Fellows

White RU Logo

People

  • Staff
  • Executive Committee
  • Seminar Fellows
  • Global Scholars

Programs

  • Distinguished Lecture Series
  • Seminar
  • Learning Community
  • Professional Development
  • Working Groups
  • Conferences

Contact Us

IRW buildingInstitute for Research on Women
160 Ryders Lane
New Brunswick, NJ 08901


P   848-932-9072
F   732-932-0861
E   This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Facebook Facebook Twitter Twitter Instagram Instagram YouTube YouTube
  • Home
  • Site Map
  • Search
  • Site Feedback
  • Login

Rutgers is an equal access/equal opportunity institution. Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to direct suggestions, comments, or complaints concerning any accessibility issues with Rutgers web sites to: accessibility@rutgers.edu or complete the Report Accessibility Barrier or Provide Feedback Form.

Copyright © 2023, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, an equal opportunity, affirmative action institution. All rights reserved.