Inaugural lecture: The ties that divide us

Programme

• Ceremonial opening with greetings from
  • President Prof Dr Enrico Schleiff, President of the Goethe University Frankfurt a. M.
  • Prof Dr Helma Lutz, Managing Director CGC
  • Prof Bettina Kleiner, Academic Hostess
• Lecture
• Reception

Abstract

Much feminist scholarship over the last 60 years has pointed to the ways in which family members are bound together in unequal relations of power. Particular family forms are sanctioned by state policies in ways that make them structures of economic and socioemotional support for many. In the social sciences, social ties are often considered central to social activism, recruitment to social movements and even social cohesion. However, the complexity and contradictory nature of social ties has often been left unattended.

This inaugural lecture explores the ways in which social ties are necessarily intersectional. Those tied are necessarily positioned in multiple social categories, locations, temporalities, processes, and structures. Multiple positionings make for contradictions in power relations and imbue ties with differences and divisions that are local, national, global, and located in histories. The lecture draws on contemporary events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and women’s rights to safety. It argues that ties simultaneously divide and bind and that, as feminist scholarship has long shown, the personal is not individual. Far from being reason for pessimism, the lecture concludes that recognition of divisions provides productive space to rethink psychosocial and intersectional divisions and ties in hopeful ways.