Jenny Sundén, Visiting Professor at the Centre for Gender Research
This Autumn semester, we have the pleasure of welcoming Jenny Sundén as Visiting Professor at the Centre for Gender Research! Jenny is Professor of Gender Studies at the Department of Culture and Education, Södertörn University, but will be active part-time at the Centre throughout the Autumn. During her time here, she will, amongst other things, be the new coordinator for the Graduate School in Gender, Humanities and Digital Cultures.
Jenny Sundén / Photo: Orlando G. Boström
What type of research do you do – and why?
For a long time, I have been researching digital media and cultures, but in recent years, I have primarily focused on two areas. The first explores humor, shame, and shamelessness in feminist activism on social media. Here, I have asked questions like: How is humor used in feminist spaces and networks on social media as a form of resistance against sexism and misogyny? What type of feminist humor goes viral? Who finds it funny, and for whom is it not? And how is viral content shaped and constrained by algorithms and privileges associated with the bodies of white, middle-class ciswomen?
The second area focuses on issues of digital sexuality, intimacy, and our digitally connected lives, ranging from networked sex toys and how they challenge the boundaries between privacy and publicness, to sexual identities and practices on sex-positive social media platforms. How do digital platforms shape queer or otherwise marginalized sexual identities and practices? How do ideas of liberation and oppression, normality and deviance, power and pleasure take shape in interplay with digital media and technologies?
So, it is about both feminism and sexual politics, addressing questions of solidarity and community as well as sexual freedom and justice. I believe it is particularly important, in dark times of anti-feminism, racism, homo- and transphobia, and neo-puritanism, both on and beyond the internet, to protect spaces that can offer some kind of respite. Both joy and pleasure have critical and political potentials and can serve as important counterforces or provide openings where something else can take shape.
What, besides research, will you be doing at the Centre for Gender Research this autumn?
I will be the coordinator for the Swedish Research Council-funded graduate school Gender, Humanities, and Digital Cultures (GENHDI), which links together three PhD programmes in gender studies, namely at Uppsala University, Stockholm University, and Södertörn University (where I also currently work and have been since 2011). The graduate school was launched last autumn, and we have a total of nine active PhD students. As the coordinator, I see my role as ensuring that the PhD students feel that, in addition to being grounded in their home institutions, they are also part of something bigger and that they are each other's colleagues across the geographical and administrative boundaries of their universities.
What are you looking forward to this semester?
I am very much looking forward to getting to know the research environment at the Centre for Gender Research, reconnecting with friends and colleagues, and, of course, meeting new ones!