Tag Archives: Normes & transgressions

Sabina Vassileva – Research & CV

“Gender of metabolism: enacting sexed bodies at the intersection of metabolic and sex hormones”

Research Area 2 – Norms and Transgressions

Contact: sabina.vassileva@soc.cas.cz

Sabina Vassileva is a doctoral candidate at Charles University, Prague. Her PhD dissertation, entitled Gender of metabolism: enacting sexed bodies at the intersection of metabolic and sex hormones contributes to CEFRES research area 2.

My dissertation project draws on the growing recognition that the increasing prevalence of metabolic conditions such as diabetes and obesity is shaped by a complex interplay of biosocial factors. These include (epi)genetics, contemporary food environments saturated with ultra-processed foods, socioeconomic precarity, psychosocial distress, and as I argue gender norms, roles, and relations, including gendered reproductive labor. I am particularly interested in how bodies undergoing hormonal fluctuations face heightened risks of metabolic complications due to the intra-actions between declining estrogen and testosterone levels, glucose metabolism, insulin resistance, insulin sensitivity, microbiome shifts, and gendered norms of care. These dynamics remain underexplored, as biomedical research has historically privileged stabilized (male) bodies in clinical trials and research design.

In my dissertation, I explore how biosocial gendered relations shape metabolic health and diagnoses such as diabetes and obesity. I examine how gender is enacted in metabolic health along three axes: self-care practices, clinical care, and biomedical research. My focus is on the hormonal intra-actions between metabolic and sex steroid hormones. I draw on a Baradian material-semiotic framework and build on critical feminist anthropology of hormones, which has foregrounded how hormones not only carry gendered imaginaries but also function as technoscientific tools of sex regulation and bodily governance. While sex hormones such as estrogen and testosterone are often studied in isolation, their intra-actions with metabolic hormones like insulin or glucagon-like peptides remain largely sidelined in sociological research. To address this gap my work combines feminist anthropology of hormones with the notion of postindustrial metabolism that enables me to trace the mutual constitutions of gender and metabolism.

Methodologically, my PhD adopts a mixed-methods approach. I combine qualitative ethnography (semi-structured interviews and participant observation)—exploring embodied experiences and everyday practices of “doing metabolism” and “doing gender”—with critical discourse analysis of biomedical research on metabolism. My ethnographic partners include people with diabetes or obesity who undergo synthetic hormonal therapies: individuals navigating menopause, andropause, or gender-affirming hormone treatments. These bodily transitions are critical sites where gendered and metabolic regulation is negotiated. Through this research, I investigate how gendered metabolic norms are not only discursively repeated but also materially metabolized—becoming embedded in the design of metabolic technologies and medications used in care. For this purpose I use visual ethnography tools like hormonal mapping.

By tracing how gender is materially metabolized in bodies, care practices, and biomedical knowledge, my project offers a feminist rethinking of metabolism as a deeply gendered and politically regulated process. By focusing on hormonal intra-actions, the project foregrounds fluid and dynamic bodily processes and gives voice to bodies that are marginalized in biomedical research on metabolism and whose mutual shaping of sexed embodiments and living in gendered social relations is not sufficiently considered.

CV

Education

  • from 2024 till present: PhD student, Sociology, Prague.
  • 2021-2024: MA, Anthropology, Charles University, Prague
  • 2017-2021: BA, Philosophy, Charles University, Prague.

Participation in research projects

  • Since 2024: PhD-participant Technocultures of extended metabolism, [GA24-12497S], project based at the Czech Academy of Sciences.
  • Since 2025: Junior researcher, Strategie AV21: Umělá inteligence pro vědu a společnost, Využití AI při managementu diabetu 1. typu, project based at the Czech Academy of Sciences.
  • Since 2025: Junior researcher, Platform workers on the czech labour market, project based at the Czech Academy of Sciences

Recent academic activities (selected)

  • June 2025: “Looped in within algorithms: A biosocial case study of a diabetic living with artificial pancreas,” paper presented at STS nordic conference, Stockholm, Sweden
  • June 2025: “Unwriting design injustice: hormonal-algorithmic tinkering
  • with open-source diabetes care technology,” paper presented at SIEF conference, Aberdeen, UK
  • May, 2025: “Attending to risky attachments: a study of a DIY loop for diabetes care, paper presented at an academic workshop “STS concepts for the life as aftermath”, Munich, Germany
  • March, 2025: “Queer metabolism: de/stabilizations of sex and gender binaries in biomedical research on gender affirming care and metabolism”, paper presented at STS HUB conference, Berlin, Germany
  • November, 2024: “Opening the black box of algorithms,” invited lecture within undergraduate course “Společnost, technologie, tělenost,” Faculty of humanities, Charles University, Prague
  • July, 2024: “Digital interfaces, real inequalities: exploring algorhitmic opacity in the platformised Czech delivery sector,” paper presented at EASA conference, Barcelona, Spain.
  • July, 2024: “Chrononormativita z perspektivy genderu a politiky těla, “ invited lecture at Woods sympozium “Time at the tips of conifers”, Orlické mountains, Czech republic
  • June, 2024: “More than Numbers: Health, Digitalization, and Bioethnography,” paper presented at the 15th MAYS Annual Meeting, Bologna, Italy.

Recent publications

  • Borisova V., Vassileva S. 2025. „Caring for more-than-human metabolic health: Self-tracking technologies as tools of calculation and communication in obesity and type 1 diabetes care“. Archivio antropologico mediterraneo. 27 (1). http://journals.openedition.org/aam/10112

Canovas O, Conan L, Gille P, Martinez A, Miranda CK, Palmea K, Roubi T, Suarez M, Vassileva S & Aline Wiame, 2024. « La nature en guerre contre la vie. Une expérimentation d’écriture cyborg entre Guattari et Haraway », Sextant, 41. http://journals.openedition.org/sextant/11409

Michaela Rumpíková – Research & CV

“Young Women in Transition: A Phenomenological Reading of First-Person Coming of Age Stories”

Contact : michaela.rumpikova@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr

Research Area 2 – Norms & Transgressions

My doctoral research proposes a phenomenological reading of contemporary French coming-of-age fiction centred around the figure of the young girl. By perceiving the young girl as a body in the state of becoming, I take up the concept of “becoming a woman” (Beauvoir, then Deleuze and Guattari) in order to extend it to a broader understanding of becoming as a directed process, that is, one influenced by gender, class, race, and sexuality norms. In 2001, Tiqqun wrote “Like so many of our unfortunate contemporaries, the Young Girl took Western metaphysics at the foot of its aporias”. Integrated into late capitalism, feminine subjectivity is formed through the norms of seduction, performance and consumption, and their internal contradictions. Nevertheless, it cannot be reduced to a simple embodiment of this ideology. Far from being a passive symptom, it also constitutes a reaction to the impasses of the system: it is a question of adapting to it, negotiating a space within it, and of becoming in a world which has already frozen into an artificial image of it. All while attempting to break free from the narrow confines of this representation, her story attempts to sketch the outlines of her own subjectivity.

In terms of methodology, I draw on the triad of orientations-objects-others (Sara Ahmed) to examine how formative trajectories are shaped by external forces that determine accessible and desirable directions and shape our relationship to the world, objects, and others. This allows me to rethink coming-of-age not as a linear or teleological route, but as an active movement, a form of navigation within a relational and dialogical field, where the body is affected without end, moved, and reconfigured in its way of being in the world. I thus reinterpret the Bildungsroman as a narrative journey, a dialectic movement of experience: a space of disadjustment, of friction, and sometimes even failure, understood not as an individual fault, but as a symptom of the norms which organise the social space.

This research draws on a corpus of coming-of-age fiction in the first person which I refer to as the ‘fourth generation’, characterised by social mobility, post-identity and the porosity of belonging (i.e. Nina Bourauoi, Faiza Guène, Wendy Delorme, Lolita Pille, Emmanuelle Richard, Blandine Rinkel, Fatima Daas). By examining the ways in which young girls negotiate their place in a world that guides them before they even have the opportunity to choose their own direction, I explore what becoming (a woman) means today, and what narrative forms and textual strategies enable us to express, reshape or invent this becoming.

CV

Education

  • 2022 – present: PhD. candidate jointly supervised by Charles University and Sorbonne Nouvelle University (programme: French and comparative literatures); Thesis: Young Women in Transition: A Phenomenological Reading of First-Person Coming of Age Stories, under the supervision of Eva Voldřichová Beránková and Alain Schaffner
  • 2019 – 2021: Master’s at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University (programme: French philology); Specialities: sexual identities and their representation in francophone literature, self-narrative, illness and auto-fiction; Dissertation: Hervé Guibert: the resurrection of the Author, under the supervision of Eva Voldřichová Beránková; Grade: excellent
  • 2015 – 2019: Bachelor’s at the Faculty of Education at Charles University (programme: French and English); Specialities: literary engagement, the literature of the Enlightenment and its emancipatory limits; Undergraduate dissertation: The emancipation of women in Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, under the supervision of Milena Fučíková; Grade: excellent

Exchange programmes

  • (2024) Vassar College (Department of modern literature)
  • (2022 – 2023) École Normale Supérieure (Department of literatures and language)
  • (2020 – 2021) Sorbonne Nouvelle University (Department of languages and literatures)
  • (2017 – 2018) Institut Catholique de Paris (Department of literature and language)

Publications

  • „Holky s bouchačkou: Odysea revolučního násilí v podání Virginie Despentes“, in: A2, 2025.
  • „Angažovat se od stolu“, in: Re:vize, 2025.
  • « Le chronotope de devenir-queer dans Arcadie (2018) d’Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam : le corps en Bildung », in : Silène, 2025. (publication to come)
  • « La vengeance au féminin : Civico et Burnier sous la tutelle de Despentes », collective volume under the supervision of Katarzyna Gadomska and Tomasz Kaczmarek, Lausanne : Peter Lang, 2024.
  • “Failing as a Literary Form of Queering”, collective volume codirected by Stefanie Mayer and Alex Lachkar, Vienna: Transcript, 2024.
  • « Floutage des frontières de genre : écrire le corps queer », collective volume under the supervision of Robert Karul and Andrea Turekova, Prague : Svet literatury 2024.
  • „Corporealita: tělo pod kapitálem“, in: Glosolalia, vol. 6, 2024.
  • „Co nenapíšu, to se nezavrší“, in: A2, 2024.
  • „Michel Houellebecq: islamofob a pornohvězda na poloviční úvazek“, in : Alarm, 2023.
  • « Hors centre et périphérie : La convergence littéraire dans l’univers de Vernon Subutex (2015 – 2017) de Virginie Despentes », in : Ostium, 2023.
  • „Marginalizace, patriarchát a emancipační boj u Virginie Despentes“, in : Alarm, 2023.
  • „Annie Ernaux: tělo a třídní boj”, in : Host, 2023.
  • „Marcel Proust a tajemství času”, in : Host, 2022.
  • „Emile Zola proti sociální slepotě“, in : H7O, 2022.

Conference(s), presentation(s), summer school(s)

  • (November 2025) International conference on the theme “Negotiating Safety. Literary and Cinematic Stagings of Tensions and Conflicts in Queer Spaces Since 1900” at the University of Vienna; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2025), “Queers at the Family Table: Negotiating the Self and the Family Through Space”.
  • (September 2025) Interdisciplinary workshop on “Rethinking the Emotions from a Historical Perspective” organised by Charles University; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2025), “Feelings of Class Shame in Contemporary Literature: Failing to Feel Right”.
  • (August 2025) Interdisciplinary summer school of the theme “Guerre-Conflit-Résilience” in Štěkeň, organised by par the Jan Hus Association; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2025), « Refuser la résilience : le récit du mal-être comme échec à résister à la négativité ». (publication to come)
  • (June 2025) International conference on the theme “Esthétiques queer et enjeux sociaux : décentrement”, organised by Clermont Auvergne University; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2025), « L’intimité éco-queer : « faire l’amour aux rochers, baiser les arbres ». (publication to come)
  • (May 2025) International conference on the theme “Colères féminines”, organised by the University of Amiens; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2025), « On se lève et on se casse : le concept de la colère féministe chez Virginie Despentes et Wendy Delorme ». (publication to come)
  • (October 2024) International conference on the theme “Bildungsroman à l’épreuve des identités sexuelles” organised by Paris Nanterre University; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2024), « Le chronotope de devenir-queer dans Arcadie (2018) d’Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam : le corps en Bildung », 24th October, Paris.
  • (August 2024) Interdisciplinary summer school on the theme “Déchets et fragments” in Kosice (University of Kosice) organised by the Jan Hus Association; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2024), « La poétique du fragment dans Le Corps lesbien de Monique Wittig », 5th July, Kosice.
  • (July 2024) Summer school in Poitiers (University of Poitiers), organised by OFFRES; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2024), « Lecture phénoménologique queer de la jeune fille dans les récits de formation : devenir dans le monde », 5th July, Poitiers.
  • (April 2024) Presentation of a thesis chapter at Vassar College; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2024), “The (Young) Girl as Contemporary Character: Becoming War Machine”, 22th April, New York.
  • (March 2024) Doctoral seminar on the theme “Écrire contre” organised by Sorbonne Nouvelle University; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2024), “Virginie Despentes and Literary Queering”, International conference “Queer/Feminist Relations in Fiction”, 15th March, Paris (online).
  • (October 2023) International conference on the theme “Queer Feminist Relations in Fiction” at the University of Vienna; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2023), “Virginie Despentes and Literary Queering”, International conference “Queer/Feminist Relations in Fiction”, 28th October, Vienna.
  • (August 2023) Interdisciplinary summer school on the theme “Le Flou” in Krahule organised by the Jan Hus Association.

CFP | Queer Bookshelves and LGBTQI+ Literatures

Circulation, Anthologisation And Canon Formation In Comparative Perspective

Deadline for submissions: November 30, 2025
Date
: May 12-13, 2026
Location: Brussels
Language: English and French
Contact email: clement.dessy@ulb.be

Organizers
Mateusz CHMURSKI, CEFRES/Sorbonne Université
Clément DESSY, FNRS/Université libre de Bruxelles
Ana I. SIMÓN-ALEGRE, Adelphi University, NYC Continue reading CFP | Queer Bookshelves and LGBTQI+ Literatures

Paper Bonds

Paper Bonds
Bookmaking for Kin, Friends and Self in Contemporary Europe and the Middle East

A project developed within AV ČR-CNRS Tandem Program supported by the Czech Academy of Sciences, CNRS and CEFRES

Project principal investigators:
Hélène Martinelli (ENS Lyon / CEFRES)  helene.martinelli@ens-lyon.fr
Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė (Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences): saba@orient.cas.cz

ANNOTATION Continue reading Paper Bonds

CFP | Central European Masculinities: Norms and Transgressions

The international conference is organized by the Institute of Slovak Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences, within the framework of the Central European Masculinities research project.

Deadline for the submissions: June 25, 2025
Please send your proposal (title and short description) to Ivana.Taranenkova@savba.sk

Date: September 29–30, 2025
Location
: Bratislava
Conference language: English

Conference Committee

  • Judit Acsády (HUN REN)
  • Marcin Bogucki (IKP WP UW)
  • Mateusz Chmurski (CEFRES/Sorbonne)
  • Filip Mazurkiewicz (IP WH UŚ)
  • Richard Müller (ÚČL AV ČR)
  • Josef Šebek (ÚČLK FF UK)
  • Wojciech Śmieja (IL WH UŚ)
  • Ivana Taranenková (ÚSlL SAV)

Continue reading CFP | Central European Masculinities: Norms and Transgressions

CFP – Queer Materiality: Becoming-Relations 

This international conference is jointly organised by Department of Czech and Comparative Literature (Faculty of Arts, Charles University), the Institute of Philosophy and Religious Studies (Faculty of Arts, Charles University), CEFRES, the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, v. v. i. (Slovak Academy of Sciences) and Center for Environmental and Technology Ethics – Prague (CETE-P) (the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences).

Deadline for submissions: October 31, 2025
Date: March 12–13, 2026
Location: Charles University, Faculty of Arts & CEFRES, Prague
Language: English (Slovak and Czech are also accepted)

Coordinators: Michaela Rumpíková, Mateusz Chmurski, Josef Šebek, Iwona Janicka, Alžbeta Kuchtová, Eva Voldřichová Beránková
Scientific Committee: TBC

Keynotes:
Prof. Jack Halberstam (Columbia University),
Dr. Bogdan Popa (Transylvania University),
Hélène Giannecchini (to be confirmed)

In their 2009 book Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable, Judith Butler attempts to rethink “the complex and fragile character of the social bond and to consider what conditions might make violence less possible, lives more equally grievable, and, hence, more livable” (2009: 1). With multiple ideological conflicts around the globe, Butler’s project remains relevant. While the Czech and Slovak governments still refuse to acknowledge the Istanbul agreement, elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe we can observe an underlying tension around LGBTQI+ and other minorities’ rights. Continue reading CFP – Queer Materiality: Becoming-Relations