Staff Profile

Research interests

Contemporary social and political theory (especially feminist theory and biopolitics), feminism, the politics of population, political economy, Palestine, popular culture

Qualifications

• Docent, Gender Studies, University of Helsinki
• PhD, Political Science, University of Helsinki
• MSc, Political Science, University of Helsinki
• BA, Political Science, University of Helsinki

Previous positions

• Co-editor, Contemporary Political Theory (2018-2024)
• Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Helsinki
• Research Fellow, Birkbeck, University of London
• Visiting Lecturer, University of Groningen
• Visiting Reseach Fellow, Waseda University

My research is mainly in feminist political theory and biopolitics. My first book The Biopolitics of Gender (Oxford University Press, 2015) introduced a new theoretical and methodological approach to gender. It theorisesdand historicised gender as an apparatus of power developed initially in 1950s and 1960s US psychiatry to govern life and labour. I traced how it was then taken up by feminist theory, demography, and EU public policy as a means of accessing and struggling over the control of populations. Overall the book reconsidered the emancipatory potential of the idea of 'gender' for feminist theory and politics today. The book was reviewed in Gender & Society, Hypatia, Journal of Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, Perspectives on Politics, Political Quarterly, Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, Choice, Times Higher Education, American Review of Politics and LSE Review of Books and won the 2017 International Studies Association's Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Book Award.

I am currently working on two projects:

1) The Commodification of Feminist Activism. This project, funded by a Senior Fellowship from the Kone Foundation, examines the politics of objects in feminist protest. Propelled by the recent mass popularisation of feminist commodities, I examine the history of objects and material production in feminism and I develop the concept of 'feminist commodity activism' to understand how commodification has shaped the recent revival of feminist activism. 

2) Social Reproduction in Palestine. In addition to theorising the relationship between settler colonialism, iterations of capitalism, and social reproduction, the research examines the ways in which occupation shapes the sexual division of labour in West Bank, and its effects on women's everyday lives. I am a member of the Palestine Research Group.

Awards

• APSA Okin-Young Award in Feminist Political Theory, 2021
• ISA Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Book Prize, 2017

Current funded projects

• A Political Sociology Approach to Parental Authority in European Family Governance (PI for UKRI/Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dr Víctor Hugo Ramirez García, 2023-2025)

Past funded projects

• The Commodification of Feminist Activism (Kone Foundation Senior Fellowship, 2020-2023)
• Checkpoints Beyond the Checkpoint: Implications for women left at home (British Academy/Leverhulme small grant, 2018-2019)
• Biopolitics and Democracy (Academy of Finland project grant, PI Sergei Prozorov, 2015-2019)
• Politics and Numbers: Policy Instruments and Global Governance (Academy of Finland project grant, PI Tero Erkkilä, 2013-2017) 

Current teaching

• POL2113: Sex, Gender and Power
• POL3046: Dissertation
• SOC8070: Global Sex, Global Race

Past teaching

• POL8058: Sex, Race and Biopolitics

PhD Supervision

Cecilia Frascaroli: The ethics of genital interventions: How to protect the autonomy and physical integrity of children. (ESRC funded)

Omar Hmidat: Necropolitics in Palestine: A socio-spatial analysis of practices of suspended death and grassroots resistance. (ESRC funded)

Kate Howley: Discourses of non-participation in Higher Education and the reproduction of class inequalities (ESRC funded)

Danlei Huang: Returning to Rural China: The Interplay Between Rural Power Structures and Women Returnees' Multidimensional Agency.

Stuti Prahdan: Sikkimese Women's Differentiated Citizenship: Postcoloniality, Indigeneity, and Gender in India. (ESRC funded)

Hala Shoman: Palestinian Women at the Intersection of Colonial and Patriarchal Violence: Cultural Renegotiations of Religion and Tradition in Gaza. (ESRC funded)

Hattie Cansino: The Politics of Paradise: Aesthetic Fantasies of Otherwise within Tourist Economies in Northeast Brazil (ESRC funded, completed 2021)

• Articles

  • Shoman H, Ajour A, Abaneh S, Jabiri A, Pratt N, Repo J, Aldossari M. Feminist Silences in the Face of Israel's Genocide Against the Palestinian People: A Call for Decolonial Praxis Against Complicity. Gender, Work & Organization 2025, 32(4), 1668-1675.
  • Pasquetti S, Repo J, Shoman H. Settler Colonialism and Mortal Dangers: Affective Responses to COVID-19 and the 2021 Israeli Bombings among Young Palestinians in Gaza. International Political Sociology 2024, 18(3), 1-20.
  • Repo J. Genocide and the Destruction of the Means of Social Reproduction in Gaza. European Journal of Politics and Gender 2025, 8(2), 492-499.
  • Repo J, Richter H. An Evental Pandemic: Thinking the Covid-19 'Event' with Deleuze and Foucault. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 2022, 23(2-3), 220-237.
  • Griffiths M, Repo J. Women and checkpoints in Palestine. Security Dialogue 2021, 52(3), 249-265.
  • Griffiths M, Repo J. Women’s Lives Beyond the Checkpoint in Palestine. Antipode 2020, 52(4), 1104-1121.
  • Repo J. Governing Juridical Sex: Gender Recognition and the Biopolitics of Trans Sterilisation in Finland. Politics & Gender 2019, 15(1), 83-106.
  • Repo J. Feminist Commodity Activism: The New Political Economy of Feminist Protest. International Political Sociology 2019, 14(2), 215–232.
  • Repo J. Gary Becker’s economics of population: reproduction and neoliberal biopolitics. Economy and Society 2018, 47(2), 234-256.
  • Griffiths M, Repo J. Biopolitics and Checkpoint 300 in Occupied Palestine: Bodies, Affect, Discipline. Political Geography 2018, 65, 17-25.
  • Repo J. Thanatopolitics or biopolitics? Diagnosing the racial and sexual politics of the European far-right [Bodies in politics]. Contemporary Political Theory 2016, 15(1), 110-118.
  • Repo J, Yrjölä R. 'We’re All Princesses Now': Sex, Class and Neoliberal Governmentality in the Rise of Middle-Class Monarchy. European Journal of Cultural Studies 2015, 18(6), 741-760.
  • Repo J. Gender Equality as Biopolitical Governmentality in a Neoliberal European Union. Social Politics 2014, 23(2), 307-328.
  • Repo J. Herculine Barbin and the Omission of Biopolitics from Judith Butler’s Gender Genealogy. Feminist Theory 2014, 15(1), 73-88.
  • Repo J. The Life Function: The Biopolitics of Sexuality and Race Revisited. Theory & Event 2013, 16(3).
  • Repo J. The Biopolitical Birth of Gender: Social Control, Hermaphroditism, and the New Sexual Apparatus. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 2013, 38(3), 228-244.
  • Repo J. The Governance of Fertility Through Gender Equality in the EU and Japan. Asia Europe Journal 2012, 10(2-3), 199-214.
  • Repo J. 'Gender' biopolitiikkana. Naistutkimus-Kvinnoforskning 2012, 3, 51-55.
  • Repo J. "Gender” biopolitiikkana. Naistutkimus-Kvinnoforskning 2012, 3, 51-55.
  • Repo J, Yrjölä R. The Gender Politics of Celebrity Humanitarianism in Africa. International Feminist Journal of Politics 2011, 13(1), 44-62.
  • Kantola J, Norocel C, Repo J. Gendering violence in the school shootings in Finland. European Journal of Women’s Studies 2011, 18(2), 183-197.
  • Repo J. A Feminist Reading of Gender and National Memory at the Yasukuni Shrine. Japan Forum 2008, 20(2), 219-243.
  • Repo J. Sukupuoli, toiseus ja väkivaltaisuuden rajat: Diskursseja naisterroristeistä ja naissotilaista Irakin sodassa. Naistutkimus-Kvinnoforskning 2007, 4, 4-15.

• Authored Book

  • Repo J. The Biopolitics of Gender. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

• Book Chapters

  • Repo J. The Biopolitical Birth of Gender: Social Control, Hermaphroditism, and the New Sexual Apparatus. In: Bird, G; Tusa, G, ed. Dispositif: A Cartography. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023, pp.351-362.
  • Repo J. The Life Function: The Biopolitics of Sexuality and Race Revisited. In: Richter, H, ed. Biopolitical Governance: Race, Gender and Economy. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018, pp.41-57.
  • Repo J. Gender Equality as Bioeconomic Governmentality in a Neoliberal EU. In: Prozorov, S; Rentea, S, ed. Routledge Handbook of Biopolitics. London: Routledge, 2016, pp.157-168.
  • Repo J. Reproduction. In: Gibbons,MT; Coole,D; Ellis,E; Ferguson,K, ed. The Encyclopedia of Political Thought. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, pp.3222-3226.
  • Repo J. Sexuality, Race and the Biopolitics of Difference. In: Kajanus,A;Meinke,M, ed. Perspectives on Difference: Makings and Workings of Power. Helsinki: Renvall Institute Publications 30, Unigrafia, 2012.

• Reviews

  • Repo J. Chloë Taylor, Foucault Feminism and Sex Crimes. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2019.
  • Repo J. Jennifer Denbow: Governed Through Choice: Autonomy, Technology, and the Politics of Reproduction. Perspectives on Politics 2016, 14(3), 854-855.
  • Repo J. Emanuela Lombardo and Maxime Forest (eds): The Europeanization of Gender Equality Policies: A Discursive-Sociological Approach. Gender and Language 2013, 7(2), 263-265.
  • Repo J. Clare Hemmings: Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory. International Feminist Journal of Politics 2012, 14(2), 319-321.
  • Repo J. Gender and Human Rights: Jutta M. Joachim, Agenda Setting, the UN, and NGOs: Gender Violence and Reproductive Rights. Laura J. Shepherd, Gender, Violence and Security. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 2010, 38(3), 855-858.
  • Repo J. Janet Hunter (ed): Japanese Women Working. Gender, Work & Organization 2009, 16(5), 645-647.
  • Repo J. Sabine Frühstück: Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army. Armed Forces & Society 2008, 34(4), 724-726.
  • Repo J. Engagements with Feminist Knowledge and Methodology in International Relations. Cooperation & Conflict 2007, 42(4), 461-465.