Children have long been dependent on the care and support of their elders. In all societies, parenthood and kinship were institutionalized in order to organize the responsibility of older people for younger people. In the course of history, these tasks have also been opened up to other and new institutions. Against this background, the Innsbruck Gender Lectures focus on the one hand on the questions of how and for what purpose parenthood is gendered in the transformation of modern, Western society, which and whose interests the allocation of gender-polarizing responsibilities serve decisively and sustainably, and which constellations of actors gain decisive power of definition over the meaning of gender-differentiated parenthood and dominate its invocation. On the other hand, these same questions are also posed with regard to the equalization of parenthood. The contributions to the lecture series will analyse gender-related differentiation and equalization strategies in the transformation process of modern parenthood from an interdisciplinary feminist perspective and discuss their omissions and idealizations.

Societies can only ensure that people become parents through generational succession. The institutionalization of parenthood thus follows an eminently public interest. Contrary to the modern socio-political demarcation between the public and private spheres, parenthood is a public matter that is assigned to the private sphere and goes hand in hand with a gender-typifying division of socially necessary work. A constant ordering of social processes and practices, social discourses and legal regulations as well as temporal and spatial structures leads to a relatively stable ordering of parenthood. This is constantly challenged by the different and contradictory expectations of other institutions, organizations and stakeholder groups with regard to child welfare. The resulting expectations of parenthood are in turn linked to social events, developments and dynamics, which are responded to by ongoing, sometimes simultaneous public interventions to legitimize and delegitimize parenthood. The Innsbruck Gender Lectures aim to question the gender concepts interwoven into these processes of order by making visible the constellations of actors, the interests and the historical circumstances of their production, interpretation and practical implementation.

Programme

Concept and Organisation
Maria Wolf, Flavia Guerrini, Mona Schamschula, Paul Scheibelhofer and Julia Tschuggnall

Contact
Julia Tschuggnall  julia.tschuggnall@uibk.ac.at +43 512 507-39862

Organised by
CGI - Center for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies Innsbruck, University of Innsbruck

In Cooperation with
Radio Freirad