The Body as a Battlefield – Discussing Body Sovereignty and Reproductive Justice

Donnerstag 7. April, 19 Uhr/Thursday April 7th, 7 pm

“Our bodies are battlefields. They are battlefields for maintaining supremacy and power, and they are battlefields for maintaining oppression and subordination. (It is a battlefield over definitions and identities. How debates are concluded and around what they revolve is what makes things matter or not. When we name something we call it to cognition, we call it to life, and when we ignore something we condemn it to inexistence. Our words define our objectives and our language dictates the horizons of our thoughts.”
Our world is compiled of various numbers of oppressive mechanisms, gender is one of them, sexuality, race, ethnicity and class are among the other. At the intersections of those Black Women and Women of Color (WoC) occupy some of the most precarious positions in this landslide of opinions, campaigns and policies, and more and more have to pay the price, physically, emotionally and collectively.)
In this open lecture we will take a closer look at the systematic and systemic oppression of Black Women and Women of Colour and its continuation across time in history. Subaltern bodies are excluded from society’s established structures of representation and denied a voice in a society that refuses to be their own. Taking a look at single events through the lenses of feminist theory of the body as well as critical race theory Zeidani Yufanyi will try to get to the undercurrents influencing these phenomena, the power and violence that inflame them and their importance to other processes of dominance, subjugation and subjectivation.
The talk will be followed by a discussion with Llanquiray Painemal and Mai Zeidani Yufanyi.

The event will be held in English and German. Chair: Iris Rajanayagam
Die Veranstaltung findet in englischer und deutscher Sprache statt.
Moderation: Iris Rajanayagam

Location: xart splitta | Hasenheide73 | 10967 Berlin | U7 Südstern (with lift) – The space is wheelchair accessible but there is a steep ramp – Please contact us if you have questions.
Mai Zeidani Yufanyi is a MA Social Science Student, Humboldt University Berlin, deals with amongst others, postcolonial Migration societies in Europe and elsewhere, asylum and migration policies, the identity finding processes and aspects of these phenomena in the context of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict and societies. As a Women of Colour, a Migrant and a Palestinian woman, intersectional feminist approaches play a central role in her work.
Mai Zeidani Yufanyi has been active in The Caravan for the Rights of Refugees and Migrants since 2005, and in The VOICE Refugee Forum since 2007.
She lives in Berlin with her partner and two children.

Llanquiray Painemal is a Mapuche activist and lives in Berlin. She is a social scientist and member of the Mapuce-Solidarity Group in the Research and Documentation Centre Chile-Latin America (FDCL). She is also part of the Berlin based Respect Network.

(picture credits: Cristy C. Road, http://www.croadcore.org/)