The halfway examination of Iiris Kestilä's dissertation was held on October 1, 2021. The working title of the dissertation is “Law, power and intimacy: Case studies on the Encounters of law and knowledge-based power in a question of Sexuality”. The topic of the work, the current stage and results, as well as how the research process will be continued were discussed at the event. The opponent was Professor Susanna Lindroos-Hovinheimo from the University of Helsinki.
The dissertation addresses the relationship between law and power in the security environment, represented in the work by the army and the migrant administration. The study analyzes the judgments of two supranational courts, the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union, in relation to sexual minorities in the above-mentioned contexts. In the footsteps of Michel Foucault, the dissertation does not so much ask whether discrimination against homosexuals is illegal or how discrimination could be addressed, but what legal and political purposes the homosexual subject serves at a particular historical moment. This question is approached in terms of both Foucault’s analysis of power and psychoanalysis. Indeed, the central theoretical contribution of the work is to deconstruct Foucault’s critique of psychoanalysis, and to demonstrate previously unnoticed intersections between Foucault’s work and psychoanalysis.
The first article of the dissertation has been published in the journal Law and Critique in 2021.
Read: Confession as a Form of Knowledge-Power in the Problem of Sexuality. DOI: 10.1007/s10978-021-09287-x.
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