The Executive Committee of the Thirteenth Annual Graduate Symposium on Women's and Gender History, "Indecency", at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is pleased to announce a call for papers. The Symposium is scheduled for March 1-3, 2012. Submissions from graduate students from any instiution and discipline on any topic in the field of women's and gender history are invited. Submission Deadline: EXTENDED TO November 15, 2011.
The Executive Committee of the Thirteenth Annual Graduate Symposium on
Women's and Gender History at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign is pleased to announce a call for papers. The
Symposium, which is the capstone event of the History Department's
Women's History month celebration, is scheduled for March 1-3, 2012.
To celebrate and encourage further work in the field of women's and
gender history, we invite submissions from graduate students from any
institution and discipline on any topic in the field of women's and
gender history. Papers submitted as a panel will be judged
individually. Preference will be given to scholars who did not present
at last year's Symposium.
The history of gender and sexuality is in many ways the history of
indecency--of bodies, acts, and attachments that were deemed indecent
by culture or legal code, and of the various ways subjects questioned,
resisted, or embraced that label. Indeed, indecency has long
functioned as a pivot upon which concepts and experiences of inclusion
and exclusion depend, and thus it offers us a valuable way of
exploring both dominant paradigms and their undoing.
The theme is meant to be open-ended--provocative rather than
prescriptive--and papers need not take up the question of indecency in
any direct or obvious way. In gathering together what we hope will be
a geographically, temporally, and disciplinarily diverse body of
papers, the conference will create opportunities for dialogue and
discussion across these different fields. To that end, successful
proposals might focus on topics such as: the construction of
indecency; immigration, hygiene, and public health; prostitution and
"indecent" labor; religion and decency; obscenity, censorship, and the
law; disgust and desire; material cultures of indecency; sensory
perception and offense; propriety and literary form; menstruation;
family structures; the grotesque in travel accounts; pornography;
gossip as a historical force or source; the history of scandal; the
moral economy of decency; responses to matter out of place; and
alternative archives for exploring indecency. As always, we welcome
proposals that surprise us by taking the theme in unexpected (or
perhaps even indecent) directions.
For the Thirteenth Annual Symposium, we are delighted to announce a
keynote speaker who engages many of these themes in her work:
• Judith Surkis, Scholar with the Institute for Advanced Study at
Princeton University. Author of Sexing the Citizen: Morality and
Masculinity in France, 1870-1920 (Cornell University Press, 2006),
Surkis is currently at work on a project titled Scandalous Subjects:
Intimacy and Indecency in France and French Algeria, 1830-1930.
To submit a paper or panel by email (preferred method): please send
only one attachment in Word or PDF format containing a 250-word
abstract and a one-page curriculum vitae for each paper presenter,
commentator, or panel chair to gendersymp@gmail.com
To submit a paper or panel in a hard copy format, please send five (5)
copies of all abstracts and curriculum vitae to:
Programming Committee, Graduate Symposium on Women's and Gender History
309 Gregory Hall, 810 S. Wright Street
Urbana, Illinois 61801
MC - 466
For more information, please contact Programming Committee Chairs
Ashley Hetrick and Derek Attig at gendersymp@gmail.com
