Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

This resonance has important implications for approaches to feminist, queer and diverse economies
activism.
Gerda Roelvink The temple: a metaphor for the spiritual commons (a conceptual experiment)
The spiritual commons as defined here refers to an understanding of spiritual life as a place of encounter.
Using the metaphor of the temple, I want to re-read spiritual life as a trajectory that finds a place of
encounter with multiple other trajectories thanks to shared common ethical protocols that make the
encounter itself possible. This encounter performs social life in its more mundane forms such as eating, news
updating, alliance making, storytelling, etc. The aim of this re-conceptualisation is to learn from these
spiritual practices to re-think our current understandings of co-existence in a form of diversity that goes
beyond issues of belief and belonging and prioritises issues of connecting and sharing.
Katherine Gibson* & Ann Hill
Building resilience in more than human community economies
The modern hyper-separation of economy from ecology has severed many of the ties that people have with
environments and species that sustain life. A first step towards strengthening resilience at a human scale
involves appreciating the longstanding ecological relationships that have supported life over the millennia.
The capacity to appreciate these relationships has, however, been diminished by economic science which
encloses ecological space within strictly delimited confines. A significant rethinking of the economy and the
dynamics of development is called for. This rethinking involves resituating humans within ecological systems
and resituating non-humans in ethical terms. It involves attending to the diversity and dynamism in ecologies
and economies and it involves situating humans and nonhumans as co-creators of community economies.
The theoretical argument of this paper is that through recognising our ethical co-existence in more than
human community economies we can better sustain life in the Anthropocene.
5E
Girls’ Space in Contemporary Japan: Containment or Subversion? (Chair, Rebecca Suter)
This session explores gendered spaces in contemporary Japan—both material and conceptual—by focusing on what
the presenters call “girls’ space.” “Girls” in this session vary; they could be female adolescents/young adult women
or middle-aged women who wish to liberate themselves from various social roles expected of mature women. All
these girls here attempt to find ways to make use of or reconfigure the masculinist spaces within which they are
contained. The presenters discuss the tension generated in these attempts by looking at museum space, Japanese
popular culture (space), and theatre space.
Mariko Murata “Girl Talk” in the Museum: Understanding Women’s Consumption of Art Space
The presentation considers the relationship between women and museum space. While art museums and
galleries provide the perfect place for “girl talk,” the environment is often described as being “a man’s
world.” (Here, “girls” mainly refer to middle-aged, middle- or upper-class women with abundant leisure
time.) But why then, do women audiences enjoy being in such a male-oriented atmosphere? Do they
reinforce the museum norm or does their consumption of museum space give them any chance of
subversion? While issues of gender mainstreaming tend to focus solely on either representations of women
within artworks or the inequality in museum professions, this presentation tries to understand what the
consumption of museum space could mean for Japanese women.
Sonoko Azuma “The Men of Her Dreams” in Japanese Popular Culture: Voices of Taiwanese Female Audiences of
the Takarazuka Revue
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