Center for Women’s & Gender Studies

*Critiquing Culture*

The Cultural Studies Graduate Conference at George Mason University 2012

Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. -Walter Benjamin

The Cultural Studies Student Organizing Committee (SOC) at George Mason
University invites paper proposals for our 6th annual Cultural Studies
Graduate Student Conference. The conference will take place on Saturday,
September 22, 2012 at George Mason University (Research 1 Building, Room
163) in Fairfax, Virginia.

CALL FOR PAPERS

At George Mason University, we acknowledge the need to specify Cultural Studies as an academic field with definable features and particular modes of methodological inquiry. In our view, Cultural Studies examines cultural objects as products of the wider social, historical, economic and political conditions that structure their formation, and acknowledges the interrelationship between these factors. In particular, Cultural Studies focuses on power relations and inequalities, which shape the horizon of possibilities for any cultural object at hand, be it a political discourse, an economic model, or a mass cultural product. As a field, Cultural Studies has expanded both geographically and theoretically, building upon its origins in the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies through the inclusion of a range of critical approaches including Marxist political economy, post-structuralism, feminism, critical theory and post-colonial studies. While the objects of Cultural Studies vary widely, the field aims at political relevance and efficacy.

In an attempt to establish a vibrant community for scholars working in precisely this interdisciplinary vein, the Cultural Studies Student Organizing Committee at George Mason University invites graduate students to submit research papers for a conference specifically oriented toward the examination of cultural objects, whether through Marxist, structuralist/poststructuralist, feminist, or other critical lenses. We encourage the submission of papers related, but not limited, to the following broad themes:

- Political Economy
- Mass & Popular Culture
- Gender & Sexuality
- Race & Ethnicity
- Representation & Aesthetics

And, given that 2012 is an election year, the conference strongly encourages papers that address, critique, or otherwise analyze:

- American Electoral Politics

*Abstracts of no more than 300 words and a current CV should be sent to critiquing DOT culture AT gmail DOT com (critiquing.culture@gmail.com) by 1
June 2012. Please include presentation title, presenter’s name, institutional affiliation, contact information, A/V requests, and any special needs required in the email. Abstracts should be sent as .doc or .rtf file attachments.*

CFP Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern and
Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History
Volume 8: Gendering the Cold War

DEADLINE September 15, 2012

In the two decades since the fall of Communist governments across
Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, scholars have used increased
access to archival sources and the fresh perspective created by time to
begin to re-evaluate the Cold War. Yet, much of this new research
remains centered around traditional topics like decision-making amongst
political elites, diplomacy and espionage.

In volume 8 of Aspasia we want to encourage scholars to move beyond these
topics and to consider the relationship between gender and the Cold War in
CESEE. We seek original research that expands the ways in which we think
about the Cold War, broadly defined. We particularly welcome submissions
that investigate how gender intersected with other categories (including
class, race, ethnicity, and political ideology) during the Cold War.

Possible research questions include: How were Cold War ideologies or
rivalries gendered? How did governments during this era promote distinct
gender ideals? In what ways did women act as Cold Warriors? How did the
Cold War serve to shape masculinities East and West and was masculinity
an essential component of Cold War political sparring? How did Cold War
assumptions shape scholarship on women and gender and to what extent are
we still beholden to those models? What was the role of gender in
resisting Cold War imperatives?  How did the Cold War affect global
activism, including feminist and peace movements?

We encourage submissions that take social and cultural, as well as
political, approaches to the study of the Cold War.
In addition to the specific theme of gendering the Cold War, we welcome
submissions on all topics related to women’s and gender history in CESEE
on an on-going basis.

Submissions of up to 8,000 words (including notes) can be sent to
Francisca de Haan (Aspasia Editor-in-Chief) at dehaanf@ceu.hu or to
Melissa Feinberg at mfeinberg@history.rutgers.edu

For more information, please write to one of the editors or visit
http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/asp/, where you can also download the
Aspasia Guidelines for Authors.

CFP: Staging Women’s Lives in Academia (Literature and Language Workplaces)

We are putting together an edited collection, tentatively titled Staging Women’s Lives in Academia. The subtitle, yet to be figured out, will indicate that our focus is upon women in literature and languages. The book, under serious consideration at Rutgers University Press for its new Higher Education Studies series, will focus upon nodal points of professional (graduate school, pre- and post- tenure, mid- and later- career, and retirement) and personal life for women in academia. We have two key premises: that choosing not to continue down the traditional path of academic life stages is as significant as following it, and that the usual conflation of academic and age-specific life stages is deeply gendered.

Our design for the collection outlines professional life stages. These range from:

• finishing the degree (who chooses to write or not write the dissertation);
• seeking academic or other employment post-Ph.D.;
• beginning and then remaining in the profession (publishing, promotions, moving into administration or not);
• leaving academia once employed (whether in a full-time or part-time, pre-tenure or post-tenure position);
• deciding to retire or to continue working.

We welcome essays from women who have followed a traditional career path, but also from those who’ve travelled other roads. We can readily see a graduate student writing about the decision to get the Ph.D. but not pursue academic employment, for example, an adjunct writing about mid-career parenting decisions, an administrator writing about being “stuck,” an associate professor talking about the decision not to seek promotion to full professor, etc. Parenting, elder-care issues, and general assessment of “professionalization” values can also lead to priorities other than those usually counseled through professional advice venues.

Although we of course want contributors to draw upon personal experience, we will be asking that they both theorize and concretize their essays. As you think about this call, we’d like to ask that you also think about some very basic questions that could help others, such as: “Do/did you discover that your experience was typical, but nonetheless didn’t expect it?” “What would you point out as the key features of this stage to a colleague just beginning it?” “How do you think your experiences were shaped by the kind of school you worked at and where your school was situated?” and, everyone’s favorite, “What would you do differently if you had it to do again?”

Besides these basic questions, there are many others that you might consider, such as: What is gendered about your career path, your career experience? How did race/ethnicity, age, class, sexuality, and culture affect your academic experience at each stage? How did your academic work feed into, enhance, or distract from other parts of your life? Or how much of your personal life intersects with or clashes with your work life? Has your work changed over time? Have you changed over time in terms of your enthusiasm for, and interest in, your work?

We want contributors to be frank, but we also want these essays to encourage “best practice” discussion and also to serve as references for other women. Because responding fully to some of these topics may be difficult, we are willing to accept proposals or essays by authors writing under a pseudonym or anonymously. We also invite proposals written by several people in dialogue with each other.

Please consider sending in a proposal for this collection, but also think about students and colleagues who fall under the “did not choose to” rubrics who may not be receiving notes such as this. Please forward this call to them. We would like to receive proposals by June 1, 2012. Proposal packets should include a 500-word abstract (or a full essay, if appropriate) and a brief c.v. Final essays should be around 6250 words, including notes and Works Cited, although we will consider shorter pieces. They should be sent to both of us:

Michelle Massé at mmasse@lsu.edu
Nan Bauer-Maglin at nbauer-maglin@gc.cuny.edu

Call for Submissions: Special Issue of Society for International Education Journal Teachers College, Columbia University: Engaging with Difference, Gender and Sexuality in Education

Across such contexts as family, peers, school, religious communities, assumptions of gender and sexuality interact with organizational discourses and practices of race and social class (Stritikus & Nguyen, 2007). This view of differences suggests that within a social category, there could be as many differences as there are similarities. Yet these categories endure, and gender continues to be invoked as a static biological feature. The political, social and cultural contexts through which categories of difference are produced and maintained should be explored, particularly in sites of knowledge production and transmission. Historically, access to particular kinds of knowledge has been stratified by categories of difference such as race, social class, gender and sexuality. One way to understand the politics of knowledge is to acknowledge the social process of knowledge transmission in relation to gendered social relations. These relations are part of the discursive space for structuring notions of gender and sexuality. We are interested in expanding this discussion to understand some of the conditions through which institutions and individuals operate on the boundaries of seemingly clearly defined constructions of gender, sex and sexuality and engage with, produce, negotiate and resist knowledge. Specifically, we would like to explore how differences of gender, sex and sexuality operate and how they are established and maintained in local and international educational contexts. We are particularly interested in papers that interrupt normalized discourses, and engage with the fluidity and unsettledness of masculinities and femininities.

We welcome submissions that address any of the questions below:
- How is difference constructed in educational contexts (defined broadly and ranging from early childhood to postgraduate studies, including the informal education spaces)? How does difference operate? How is difference lived and experienced in/through gendered identities and sexuality/sexual subjectivities?
- Which differences are marked or left unmarked? How are hierarchies established? Why are particular differences maintained and others marginalized, and what are the related investments? In what situations do particular differences command more power, and when and how does this power vary with changing contexts?
- How do educational institutions, educators, administrators, and/or students structure difference? What is the role of formal and informal curriculum in the structuring difference?
- How and in what ways does difference constitute students and teachers who see and act in particular ways? What do teachers and learners learn and internalize about gender and sexuality as desiring subjects? How are “proper” and “improper” desire learned and taught?
- Can (real or imagined) borders of sex, gender and sexuality be conceived of as sites of creative dialogue and social agency? In what ways does the space of ‘trans’ provide opportunities for collaboration as opposed to conflict?
- How do normalized discourses in educational contexts create or limit the space for the performance and enactment of difference? In what ways can we re-imagine these discourses? Consider media discourses that construct youth as either hyper sexual or asexual, school policies for the inclusion and exclusion of those who are different such as immigrants, LGBT youth, ethnic minorities, disabled students, etc.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
- Theoretical papers: These papers are informed by sociological, anthropological, educational and/or feminist theory, and provide new ways of exploring and understanding difference.
- Empirical research papers: These papers present studies of micro or macro social contexts to deepen our understanding of the ways in which difference can be established, enacted and/or resisted.
- Microsoft Word document, double-spaced, Times New Roman 12-point font. American Psychological Association (APA) standard format for citations and references.
- Cover sheet should include name, degree, and school/department affiliation. Name should not appear on any of the pages, except on the cover sheet.
- Please send submissions as .doc attachments to TC.SIE.Journal@gmail.com. All submissions should be copied to Mary Ann Chacko (mac2322@tc.columbia.edu).
- Please direct questions to editors: Shenila Khoja-Moolji (ssk2143@tc.columbia.edu) and Stephanie McCall (sdm36@tc.columbia.edu).
- All submissions will go through a double-blind peer review process.

CFP: Feminists Face the State:
A Berkeley Symposium on Politics, State Power and Gender
November 7, 2012
9 am – 5 pm

How does state power organize, and is organized by, gender? This conference will build a sustain dialogue around the intersection of gender, politics and the state. It aims to recuperate the notion of “facing” the state as a form of active, feminist critique vis-à-vis state power. By “facing the state,” we hope to both explore the different gendered forms of power implicated in the multifaceted nature of the state as well as “face” – as feminists – the intractable and deeply ambiguous relationship between the state and the project of feminism. In doing so, we hope to use this conference as a forum to collaboratively build approaches that critically and imaginatively think beyond existing state-related structures and practices and that reimagine the possible.

With this line of inquiry in mind, we call for papers that provide feminist analyses of the state and/or analyze the relationship between the state and feminism. Possible topics might include: What does a comparison of the welfare, neoliberal and security state paradigms reveal about the state as a gendered institution as well as the possibilities for feminist critique? In what ways does the state act as a privileged institution for gendering social structure and practice, or does it merely reproduce, and perhaps amplify, the gendered fall-out of the market and other social institutions? What might a “feminist” state look like – is it an oxymoron? To what extent does focusing on “masculinity” provide a useful – or limiting – framework for understanding the state? How might we “face” the state from an intersectional perspective? How is feminist critique expanded by looking beyond the modern Western capitalist state to other state formations across time and place?

This all-day conference will take place on November 7th, 2012 (appropriately the day after the U.S. Presidential Elections), and it is funded by the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley.

If you are interested in participating, please contact me, Jennifer Carlson, at jdawncarlson@berkeley.edu by Monday, April 30th, with a 200-word abstract.

Call for Papers

CLGBTH Affiliate Program

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association

January 3-6, 2013 in New Orleans

Presenters sought for a panel on locating LGBT history beyond the gay
ghetto. Potential topics can include: the LGBT community as actors in urban
gentrification or anti-gentrification efforts, historical spaces in which
LGBT and heterosexuals interacted, LGBT involvement or leadership in social
or political movements other than LGBT activism, sexuality and urban
development, and more. Potential presenters should send a 250 word abstract
of their proposed presentation, a CV, and a short (~100 word) bio to Katie
Batza at cbatza1@uic.edu by April 20, 2012.

“Queer Mythologies: Untangling Sex and Gender Myths”
An area of multiple panels for the Film & History Conference on “Film and
Myth”
September 26-30, 2012
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
www.filmandhistory.org
Deadline: June 1, 2012

Movies and television are one important way that many of us learn about
gender and sexuality. The stories we see played out on the large or small
screen tell us – explicitly or implicitly – what it means to be male or
female, what it means to be in love, what the narrative possibilities are
for constructing a life and forming relationships with other people. Too
often in film history, gay and lesbian lives have been mythologized – in
films from Cruising to Boys Don’t Cry to Brokeback Mountain – as lonely,
desperate, and destined for a bad end, a trajectory famously catalogued by
Vito Russo in The Celluloid Closet. Queer lives are often positioned
as opposite “normal,”  heterosexual lives. Yet other – queer – mythologies
are possible: from Hedwig’s re-imagining of the origin of love myth in
Hedwig and the Angry Inch, to Omar and Johnny happily splashing each other
at the end of My Beautiful Laundrette—certain films find ways to
re-construct dominant mythologies and perhaps define new ones. How do
films, TV, and online media perpetuate, subvert, or otherwise engage with
these and other myths concerning sexuality and gender?

This area, comprising multiple panels, will treat all aspects of myths
concerning sexuality, gender, and queerness in film, television, and
on-line media. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the
following:

Coming Out Stories
Romantic Mythologies
Classical Mythology Queered
Politics and Sex: From Myth to Public Policy
The “Gay Gene”: Science and Gender
“It Gets Better”: On-line Mythologizing
Mythologies of the Closet
Either/Or: The Myth of Gay or Straight

Proposals for complete panels (three related presentations) are also
welcome, but they must include an abstract and contact information,
including an e-mail address, for each presenter. Please e-mail your
200-word proposal by June 1, 2012:

Pamela Demory, Area Chair, 2012 Film & History Conference
“Queer Mythologies: Untangling Sex and Gender Myths”
University of California, Davis
Email: <phdemory@ucdavis.edu>

“Childhood, Sexuality and Sexualisation” (editors: Emma Renold, Jessica Ringrose and Danielle Egan. Palgrave.

If successful, this collection will be the first academic volume that brings together groundbreaking scholarship on the sexual cultures of children and young people living in new sexually saturated societies. It will offer a range of new research findings directly foregrounding the experiences of children and young people’s sexualities across a range of sites and spaces. It will also unpack the socio-historical, cultural and policy contexts of the sexualisation debates. Collectively the chapters not only complicate and contextualise the assumptions in popular texts and governmental reports over the ‘sexualisation of the child’, but identify new pressures facing tweens and teens as they negotiate their own and others’ sexual identities, relationships and cultures. Key questions that this edited volume engage with include:

- Do the contemporary sexualisation debates constitute a renewed crisis of childhood? How is this aged, gendered, raced and classed?

- What are the theoretical and methodological challenges in researching young sexualities in an era of ‘sexualisation’?

- How are children and young people negotiating global sexualised cultures in locally and culturally specific ways?

- What can the history of regulated young sexual cultures, relationships and identities tell us about how to engage in the contemporary and changing sexual/ised landscape?’

CALL FOR CHAPTERS
We encourage submissions that are in dialogue with the aims of the collection and the key questions above. We welcome scholars from diverse theoretical and disciplinary fields, including those working across a range of regional, national and transnational contexts. We thus welcome contributions from critical social psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians and cultural studies scholars who are engaged with empirical research projects on children, childhood, sexuality and sexualisation. We especially welcome chapters which foreground the perspectives and experiences of children and young people themselves.
ABSTRACTS: An abstract of no more than 300 words and a short biography of no more than 50 words should be emailed to: Dr Emma Renold (renold@cf.ac.uk<mailto:renold@cf.ac.uk> ) no later than the 5 April 2012. Final decisions on the selection of abstracts will be no later than 30th April 2012.

Full chapters will be between 6000-7000 words and further details regarding time frames will be provided when the book contract has been finalized and agreed.

Queer Studies Easter Symposium
30 April – 3 May, 2012 Mexico City
Conference Languages: English and Castilian
Conference Homepage:

http://www.enkidumagazine.com/chics/queerstudies/qs_12.htm

Deadline for submission of paper proposals: 20. March 2012

The International Society for Cultural History and Cultural Studies (CHiCS), AIDSinCULTURE.org and Enkidu Magazine invite the global community to a vibrant and exciting multi-disciplinary, multi-lingual and multi-cultural Queer Studies Easter Symposium in Mexico City in spring, 2012.

The Symposium aims at exploring recent developments in theory and method in Queer studies as well as the broad themes of sexual diversities through time and space, gender constructions, sex-gender subjectivities, and sexual identity constructions from a wide and diverse range of perspectives.

The conference has this year a very broad, interdisciplinary scope and papers addressing virtually all cultural, social and artistic expressions and constructions of genders and sexualities from a wide range of perspectives will be considered. Wide and diverse interpretations of the conference theme ranging from the predictable to the surprising are encouraged.

More than 400 scholars from more than 35 countries have participated in previous editions of the Symposium and the conference. The event promises to be equally diverse, multi-cultural and multi-lingual in 2012.

Last year, the Symposium filled up very quickly and sadly a number of very exiting papers could not be accommodated in the program on time. Early submission is therefore suggested.

The program will be organized in a large number of special thematic sessions and sub-conferences covering a highly diverse series of topics. Of particular interest are contributions that explore Queerness and Border crossing from a wide range of different perspectives as well as representations and social constructions of sexual diversities through time and space.

Possible themes and topics might include:

- Colonisation of the body and the mind
- Representations of indigenous sexualities in colonial and postcolonial discourse
- Ethnopornography
- Silence and subtext
- Historical representations of alternative sexualities
- The historiography of homosexualities and sexual identity formations
- Sexualities in transition
- Maculinities
- The role of culture in gender identity and sexual identity formations

Papers are welcomed on virtually all related topics and themes, independently of time, period and geographical focus. Also papers of comparative phenomena will be considered.

Interdisciplinary perspectives are especially appreciated since all these topics in themselves stretch across several disciplines: history, cultural studies, literary studies, linguistics, psychology, political sciences, pedagogy, ethnology, anthropology, sociology…

The conference aims at bringing together academics working in all relevant disciplines as well as activists, artists and other professionals, and promoting innovative multidisciplinary and multicultural exchange and dialogue. Graduate and postgraduate students are encouraged to attend and present papers.

CHICS’ academic conferences are characterized by traditional paper presentations in panel sessions with three speakers each, followed by lively exchange, dialogue and interaction between speakers and audience in many small groups, workshops and seminars rather than by formal plenary sessions. Our conferences provide a forum for diverse voices from all over the world, to come together and make connections across linguistic, cultural and academic barriers.

The conference sessions will be conducted in Spanish and English. Some sessions will be bilingual and conducted in both languages with interpreters. Other sessions will have simultaneous translations. Many sessions will be conducted with interpreters for sign language (on request).

* Paper and panel proposals

500 word abstracts should be submitted to the organising committee in English, Castilian, Nahuatl, German or French. The languages for presentation will be English and Castilian.

Papers should be of approximately 20 – 30 minutes duration (circa 8 – 10 pages). Other forms of presentation, for instance workshops, panel debates and poster sessions will be considered on request. Typically, a panel of academic papers includes 3 (maximum 4) speakers and 1 moderator (session chair). Each session will last for 2 hours allowing for 30 minutes for each speaker and a further 30 minutes for questions and discussion.

* Proposals for panel sessions

Proposers should submit:
(1) Session title and a session intro (ca 100 words),
(2) Paper titles,
(3) Abstracts for each paper (500 words),
(4) Short biography for each participant and the panel chair (ca 100-150 words),
(5) Institutional affiliation and address for each participant,
(6) Audio-visual and other technical requirements.

It is recommended to use the form here: http://www.enkidumagazine.com/chics/queerstudies/registration_form_qs.htm , when submitting a presentation proposal.

However, abstracts will also be accepted as e-mail attachments to queerstudies@enkidumagazine.com .

If you would like to propose a panel session, and want assistance in finding speakers and/or a session chair, we can publish a call for papers for your panel session on the conference web site and distribute it in our newsletter. If you have an idea for a thematic panel session and would like us to publish a call for papers on the conference website, please send us a proposal by e-mail to queerstudies@enkidumagazine.com

* Proposals for individual papers

Abstracts are to be submitted, along with the presenter’s name, address, telephone, email, and institutional affiliation. It is recommended to use the form here: http://www.enkidumagazine.com/chics/queerstudies/registration_form_qs.htm, when submitting an abstract. However, abstracts will also be accepted as e-mail attachments to queerstudies@enkidumagazine.com.

All correspondence for this conference will be conducted via email. You will be notified by e-mail whether your proposal has been accepted or rejected.

We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted within few days. If you do not receive a reply from us within a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to resend your abstract and resubmit your registration form, and if possible, suggest an alternative e-mail address. In particular delegates using hotmail or yahoo accounts to receive conference related e-mails often experience problems receiving conference information by e-mail.

E-mails from the conference organisers are often delivered to your spam folder and not to your inbox, unless you remember to add the following e-mail addresses: queerstudies@enkidumagazine.com and liowlb@enkidumagazine.com to your safe-list. The first address is the general e-mail address of Enkidu Magazine and will be used to send conference newsletters and general information about the conference. The second, is the e-mail address of the academic coordinator of the conference and will be used for individual communication with delegates.

* EXHIBITORS, PUBLISHERS AND ARTISTS:

Artists are welcome to suggest exhibitions and displays of art during the conference.

Organisations, universities and publishers are welcome to sign up for information stands at the conference center.

The following information is required by artists, publishers and other exhibitors during the conference:

1) Technical Description of the information stand or artwork with indications of technical requirements for their presentation, the size and extension of the individual artworks to be presented.

2) Estimated Insurance value of the artworks

3) One image of a representative sample of artistic work from the exhibitions can be sent by e-mail to the conference organizers in the format tiff or jpg.

4) Curriculum Vitae of artist (or organisation).

5) Description of Exhibition (300 – 500 words).

6) Short bio of artist (or organisation).

* CULTURAL AND SOCIAL PRE-CONFERENCE ACTIVITIES

Before the formal academic sessions of conference, we will organise a number of cultural and social activities for conference delegates and we hope that many international delegates will consider arriving in Mexico City some days before the conference and participate in these activities.

In addition conference delegates with name badges will be given discounts and sometimes free access to various theatre plays, concerts, film screenings and other events before and during the conference. The final program for the cultural and social pre-conference activities will be published on the conference web site and will be announced also in the conference newsletter, which will be distributed by e-mail before the conference.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The second-annual Washington University in St. Louis Graduate History
Conference: The History of the Body

October 26-27, 2012 at Washington University in St. Louis

Keynote speaker: Professor Leor Halevi, Vanderbilt University

The Graduate Conference Committee of the History Department at Washington
University in St. Louis invites graduate students to submit proposals for
its second annual Graduate Conference.

We welcome interdisciplinary submissions for this broadly conceived topic,
and are excited to see in what new and creative directions participants
will take this theme. For example, the “History of the Body” might include
bodies used for political and religious expression, gender and the body,
sexualities, the body politic, the transgression of boundaries, the
movement of people, changing ideas of “good” and “bad” bodies over time,
and the idea of bodies in the formation and appropriation of personal and
impersonal spaces. Very literal uses of the “body” as well as more
representational and less-direct approaches are equally welcome.

The Graduate History Conference chooses a biennial rotating theme, allowing
for deeper examination of historical problems and questions over a period
of time. This year will be the second year to explore the “History of the
Body,” and we are eager to see how this provocative topic will develop in
the concluding installment of the conference.

Deadline for submission of proposals: June 1, 2012

Proposals for papers should be between 200-300 words. Final papers should
be approximately 20 minutes in length. Individual papers as well as
proposals for panels will be considered. We welcome new as well as
returning presenters. Please submit proposals to the conference website,
http://history.artsci.wustl.edu/GHA/Conference/Submissions.  For any
questions please contact Ethan Bennett at ethanrbennett@gmail.com.

Society for International Education Journal

Teachers College, Columbia University

Call for Papers

Engaging with Difference, Gender and Sexuality in Education

Submission deadline – April 30, 2012

Differences can get lost or never discovered when gender and sexuality are
not thought of as produced, (re)produced, and shifting within specific
contexts and social relations. Across such contexts as family, peers,
school, religious communities, assumptions of gender and sexuality interact
with organizational discourses and practices of race and social class
(Stritikus & Nguyen, 2007). This view of differences suggests that within a
social category, there could be as many differences as there are
similarities. Yet these categories endure, and gender continues to be
invoked as a static biological feature. The political, social and cultural
contexts through which categories of difference are produced and maintained
should be explored, particularly in sites of knowledge production and
transmission. Historically, access to particular kinds of knowledge has been
stratified by categories of difference such as race, social class, gender
and sexuality. One way to understand the politics of knowledge is to
acknowledge the social process of knowledge transmission in relation to
gendered social relations. These relations are part of the discursive space
for structuring notions of gender and sexuality. We are interested in
expanding this discussion to understand some of the conditions through which
institutions and individuals operate on the boundaries of seemingly clearly
defined constructions of gender, sex and sexuality and engage with, produce,
negotiate and resist knowledge. Specifically, we would like to explore how
differences of gender, sex and sexuality operate and how they are
established and maintained in local and international educational contexts.
We are particularly interested in papers that interrupt normalized
discourses, and engage with the fluidity and unsettledness of masculinities
and femininities. We hope that such an engagement with difference will focus
the attention of scholars and practitioners on the fuzzy boundaries of the
“three-ply yarn” (Jordan-Young, 2010, p.15) of sex, gender and sexuality,
and open and extend possibilities for dialogue and participation.

We welcome submissions that address any of the questions below:

-        How is difference constructed in educational contexts (defined
broadly and ranging from early childhood to postgraduate studies, including
the informal education spaces)? How does difference operate? How is
difference lived and experienced in/through gendered identities and
sexuality/sexual subjectivities?

-        Which differences are marked or left unmarked? How are hierarchies
established? Why are particular differences maintained and others
marginalized, and what are the related investments? In what situations do
particular differences command more power, and when and how does this power
vary with changing contexts?

-        How do educational institutions, educators, administrators, and/or
students structure difference?  What is the role of formal and informal
curriculum in the structuring difference?

-        How and in what ways does difference constitute students and
teachers who see and act in particular ways?  What do teachers and learners
learn and internalize about gender and sexuality as desiring subjects? How
are “proper” and “improper” desire learned and taught?

-        Can (real or imagined) borders of sex, gender and sexuality be
conceived of as sites of creative dialogue and social agency? In what ways
does the space of ‘trans’ provide opportunities for collaboration as opposed
to conflict?

-        How do normalized discourses in educational contexts create or
limit the space for the performance and enactment of difference? In what
ways can we re-imagine these discourses? Consider media discourses that
construct youth as either hyper sexual or asexual, school policies for the
inclusion and exclusion of those who are different such as immigrants, LGBT
youth, ethnic minorities, disabled students, etc.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

-        Theoretical papers: These papers are informed by sociological,
anthropological, educational and/or feminist theory, and provide new ways of
exploring and understanding difference.

-        Empirical research papers: These papers present studies of micro or
macro social contexts to deepen our understanding of the ways in which
difference can be established, enacted and/or resisted.

-        Microsoft Word document, double-spaced, Times New Roman 12-point
font. American Psychological Association (APA) standard format for citations
and references.

-        Cover sheet should include name, degree, and school/department
affiliation. Name should not appear on any of the pages, except on the cover
sheet.

-        Please send submissions as .doc attachments to
TC.SIE.Journal@gmail.com. All submissions should be copied to Mary Ann
Chacko (mac2322@tc.columbia.edu).

-        Please direct questions to editors: Shenila Khoja-Moolji
(ssk2143@tc.columbia.edu) and Stephanie McCall (sdm36@tc.columbia.edu).

-        All submissions will go through a double-blind peer review process.

References

Jordan-Young, R. M. (2010). Brain Storm: The flaws in the science of sex
differences. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Stritikus, T., & Nguyen, D. (2007). Strategic transformation: Cultural and
gender identity negotiation in first-generation Vietnamese youth. American
Educational Research Journal, 44(4), 853-895.

MSA-14: October 18-21, 2012. Las Vegas, Nevada; Flamingo Hotel

For at least two decades, scholars have addressed the striking convergence between modernist writers and reactionary, right-wing, or fascist regimes. From Andrew Hewitt’s Fascist Modernism and Fredric Jameson’s Wyndham Lewis: the Modernist as Fascist to Leon Surette’s just-published Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics, critics have sought to determine why so many modernist innovators were drawn to right-wing or reactionary politics. Yet the discussion has still largely been confined to the political leanings of male modernists, adverting to a fairly standard set of usual suspects: Eliot, Yeats, Pound, Lewis, Marinetti. This panel seeks to bring gender more squarely into this discussion, asking whether (or if) female modernists shared tendencies similar to their right-wing or reactionary male counterparts. Were female modernists equally drawn to reactionary or right-wing political regimes? If so, how did gender inflect the nature of their attraction? We encourage papers that tease out the complexities of this historical moment and the specific possibilities of right-wing or reactionary thought available to early twentieth-century female modernists (authoritarianism, National Socialism, Fascism, Maurrasianism, Royalism, Communism,etc.). Prospective panelists should send a 500-word abstract and a short (2-3 sentence) scholarly biography to Annalisa Zox-Weaver (annalisazoxweaver@gmail.com) and Barbara Will (barbara.will@dartmouth.edu) by March 30, 2012.

The overwhelming success of Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas finally confirmed Stein’s celebrity status in the United States in 1933. Yet she lamented that she had become known less as an important author than as the host of a Parisian salon in which famous writers and European painters gathered amidst her collection of modern art. Her earlier, more challenging writing continued to go unnoticed and unpublished despite the wide public appeal of the autobiography and the success of Virgil Thomson’s production of Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts in 1934. Her growing popularity in the United States induced the reluctant Stein to return for a lecture tour through which she would introduce her more obscure work to an American audience—even if it meant having to explain it to them. As she tells us, she “want[ed] readers not collectors…she want[ed] her books read not owned” (Autobiography 301).

Even so, few scholars took serious interest in Stein before the mid-twentieth  century, and, even then, the criticism that emerged tended to make Stein herself the main subject. In the later 1970s and throughout the 1980s, Stein’s writing began to receive attention from a variety of scholars: those who sought to align her literary aims with the Cubist painters; feminists who read her work as a challenge to patriarchal language; and critics who examined Stein’s writing as a more general subversion of the process of signification. In the 1990s, Stein criticism turned its focus to how her writing engages issues of American national and/or cultural identity. As Lisa Ruddick observes, “work in a cultural
studies mode…moved the conversation about Stein’s artistic innovations beyond a sense of her offering a challenge to patriarchy in the abstract” and into “larger cultural fields—fields defined by discourses of race and ethnicity” (Modern Fiction Studies 648).

Most recently, Stein the celebrity has re-emerged. Her life has again become the focus of scholarly inquiry in articles, books and exhibits: Stein’s politics, Stein’s friendships, Stein the collector, and Stein the visual icon. Popular interest in Stein has of late generated The Steins Collect museum exhibit, a children’s book celebrating her writing, a novel told from the perspective of Stein and Toklas’s Vietnamese cook, and Stein as a character in the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris. In addition, Seeing Gertrude Stein, the companion book to the current exhibit of the same name, creates a cultural and visual portrait of Stein, rendering “a richly complex woman” whose “contradictions ran deep” (7). No doubt, these recent examinations enrich and complicate our understanding of Stein and of how we might read her work, as she implores us to do.

Here, in response to these current trends, we seek to assemble a collection of essays that turns the lens back on Stein’s writing, in and across all genres in which she wrote. We are interested in scholarly essays that take Stein’s primary works as their core analytical focus. We do not suggest jettisoning contextual approaches, but we do encourage inquiry into the writing itself, in all its historical trajectories and discursive iterations. Essays might ask what it is we learn from the tensions produced in Stein’s work in order to expand fields of inquiry and transform the ways we can read, write about, and teach her writing.

The editors are pleased to report that this project has already received attention from a scholarly press. Please send abstracts of 500-700 words (final essays to range from 4,000-8,000 words), brief bios, and CVs to Janet Boyd (boydj@fdu.edu) and/or Sharon Kirsch (Sharon.Kirsch@asu.edu) by May 15, 2012. Queries are welcomed.

Possible topics (others are welcome):
Genre studies
Rhetoric
Linguistics
Formalism
Poetry
Drama/plays
Autobiography
Travel writing
War narrative
Racial theory/identity
Queer theory
Gender/sexuality
Spatiality/temporality
Geography/landscape
National/ethnic identity
Political discourse
Post-colonialism
Advertising/public relations
Celebrity/fame
Humor
Pleasure