Announcing the 2013 Graduate Symposium on Women's and Gender History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, February 28-March 1, 2013:
More than two decades have passed since a rich body of literature made Women's and Gender History a vital field with exploitation as a key theme. Today, exploitation remains an important idea in Women's and Gender History. But, African American feminist Patricia Hill-Collins told us that exploitation "cannot be reduced to one fundamental type" and that these multiple forms of exploitation are organized in a "matrix of domination." Exploitation is multidimensional and nuanced. It transgresses time and space. It moves across bodies, borders, and genders. It shapes social relationships. Exploitation, then, should be approached from a multifaceted angle using a transdisciplinary lens.
However, we must not reinscribe intellectual imperialism, assuming that gender is a synonym for women. For example, gender, like race and class, is a historically situated, constructed social category that changes meaning at different historical moments. Yet women and gendered subjects have been exploited by these categories, depending on the space, time, and political condition before them. They have never been passive, but active agents in resisting exploitation.
We seek papers that engage the concept of exploitation broadly across time period, across genders, across sexualities, across and beyond the nation-state borders. While we value essays that take a historical approach, they need not be historical. We strongly encourage papers that use a transdisciplinary approach to understand various aspects of Women's and Gender History/Studies. We especially encourage submissions that focus on traditionally under-studied topics within the larger field of Women's and Gender History/Studies, and among them, indigenous women and queer indigenous subjects. Submissions with a focus on transnational exploitation are also strongly encouraged. Again, we would like to reiterate that we are not only interested in how subjects in Women's and Gender History/Studies have been exploited, but also the various methods they have used to resist exploitation.
Possible topics may include (but certainly not limited to):
- Media and exploitation
- Transnationalism and Women's and Gender Studies
- Transnational sexuality
- Exploitation of bodies
- Settler Colonialism and Exploitation
- The law and exploitation
Please submit your 300-500 word abstracts by November 29, 2012 (NEW DEADLINE) to gendersymp@gmail.com.
