Venue: Violet Laidlaw Room, Chrystal Macmillan Building & Online

Presenters: Annukka Lahti, Anna Heinonen and Maiju Parviainen, University of Eastern Finland

Details: The presentations draw from The Academy of Finland and Kone foundation funded research project Where the rainbow ends: the becoming of LGBTIQ+ separations (AoF project 349408, 2022–2025).

The project explores how LGBTIQ+ breakups emerge in the various unfolding conditions of the heteronormative world and advances a processual and relational take on power relations and intersectionality. To highlight the importance of context, the project explores LGBTIQ+ break-ups in two locations: various towns in Finland, and in England, UK. The analysis draws on multisensory interviews with recently separated LGBTIQ+ people, interviews with experts, and observations at a seminar for recently separated LGBTIQ+ people. The project develops a queer feminist, new materialist and affect-theoretical approach to break-ups and shows that the effects of LGBTIQ+ break-up assemblages are determined not by the partners’ LGBTIQ+ identities, but by the specific connections they form with other bodies, (power) relations, ideas and affects.

PI, Dr Annukka Lahti’s presentation explores how vulnerabilities, privileges and use of therapeutic understandings and services accumulate in asymmetrical ways in intersectional LGBTIQ+ breakup assemblages: for example as the downplaying of vulnerability and pain in black bisexual/gay men’s accounts, as the piling of injurious elements such as transphobia, exhaustion and limited means combined with arbitrary therapeutic support in trans people’s lives, and as supporting therapeutic infrastructures in white middle-class participants’ breakup assemblages. However, the assembling human and non-human elements shift the becoming of these assemblages, moulding the experiences of privilege and oppression in LGBTIQ+ breakups.

Dr Anna Heinonen’s presentation addresses a Finnish separation support group for LGBTIQA+ people as a series of “orchestrated” affective events. In the group, therapeutic understandings and structured practices of the support group entangle with the participants’ unruly affects, struggles with societal norms, and emergent bonds, enabling the becoming of a “queer breakup”.

Dr Maiju Parviainen will explore the perceptions that Finnish relationship experts have on the specific issues related to LGBTIAQ+ breakups and the competence required from the professionals to recognize these issues. The specific issues and professional competence are considered in the context of heteronormativity. The study is based on interviews with therapists and counsellors specialized in questions related to LGBTIAQ+ relationships and breakups.

Registration:

This is a hybrid event. Anyone who registers to attend virtually will be sent their joining link for Microsoft Teams via email prior to the date of the event.

LGBTIQ+ Breakups