[Bilimsel Haber] Interdisciplinary Conference in Women’s Studies

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

	*Performing Gender (9/1/06; 2/22-24/07)*
*Location:* 	Tennessee
<http://www.h-net.org/announce/geography.cgi?geography=United%20States&location=Tennessee>, 

United States
<http://www.h-net.org/announce/geography.cgi?geography=United%20States>

	

	

	

WOMEN’S STUDIES INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE—CALL FOR PAPERS

Interdisciplinary Conference in Women’s Studies
Middle Tennessee State University
Murfreesboro, TN 37132

February 22-24, 2007

Proposal Information
We invite proposals for individual papers, panels, and other
presentation formats such as roundtables, posters, and performances with
scholarly and/or activist emphasis, addressing the general conference
topic of women’s studies or the featured theme of “Performing Gender.”
Proposals are welcome from all scholarly fields and disciplines,
including the sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts, design,
business, sports, and cultural studies.

“Performing Gender” involves a wide spectrum of subjects and approaches.
Possible topics might address the following questions. How is gender
enacted? How does gender performance—and critique of that
performance—affect other aspects of society? What are the consequences
of gender performance? What are the implications of race, class, and
nationality for gender performance? How do gender performance,
sexuality, and sexual orientation intersect? What facets of gender
performance remain largely unacknowledged? How has the backlash against
conscious gender performance framed itself? How do various social groups
negotiate gender?

Possible topics addressing the theme of “performing gender”:

· The Biology, Sociology, and Psychology of Transgender & Transsexuality
· Race, Ethnicity, and Class in the Performance of Gender
· Media Genders
· Globalizing Gender: International Gender Performances
· Performing Queer Gender
· Marketing and Advertising: The Commodification of Gender
· Gender Identity in the Visual Arts
· Science and the Study of Gender Performance
· Corporate Genders: Doing Business, Doing Self
· Sports and Gender Performance
· Cyborgs, Cyberspace and Cybersex: Performing Gender Online
· Children, the Family, and Gender Performance
· Performing Gender and Medicine: Illness and Etiology
· Gendered Language and Speech Performance
· Gender and War
· The Theater of Gender Performance
· Performing the Academy: Gender in the Classroom
· Literary Genders: Performance in/and the Text
· Fashion and Gender Performance
· Presentations and Representations of the Gendered Self
· Feminism and Gender
· Religion and Gender Performance
· Gender Performance and Ecology
· The Ethics of Performing Gender
· Politics of/and Gender Performance
· Voyeurism: Watching Gender Performance

Proposals for 18-20-minute individual presentations and for posters
should be 250-500 words, with working bibliography. Panel proposals
should include 250-500 word abstracts and bibliographies for each
presentation (2-3 per panel). Workshop and performance proposals (up to
one hour in length) should include a description of purpose, form, and
content. Include name, contact information, and a brief c.v. with all
proposals.

All materials should be postmarked or received by email/fax by September
1, 2006.

Send proposals to
Elyce Rae Helford, Conference Chair
Women’s Studies Program, Box 498
Middle Tennessee State University
Murfreesboro, TN 37132

telephone: (615) 898-5910
fax: (615) 898-5289
email: womenstu at mtsu.edu

Keynote Speaker: Jill Dolan
Jill Dolan is the author of four major studies of feminist performance,
including Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, and
Performance and Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Her
next project, a critical memoir called From Flannel to Fleece: A Lesbian
of a Certain Age, chronicles what it has meant to come out as a lesbian
feminist and come into middle-age under the auspices of the “queer”
moment in activist and cultural politics. Her blog, “The Feminist
Spectator,” can be accessed at www.feministspectator.blogspot.com.

“Her writings reveal her commitment to healing the theory/practice split
through an activist pedagogy thoroughly immersed in the critical shifts
associated with the emergence of performance studies, queer theory and
poststructural feminism. Furthermore, they include practical suggestions
for connecting academia to the public sphere. She credits the
development of performance studies as a realm that considers both the
performing arts and performativity, loosely performance in everyday
life, as a facilitating factor in the program's ability to focus on
performance as a public practice.” Clyde Smith on Jill Dolan

Featured Performer: Deb Margolin
Playwright and performance artist Deb Margolin is a founding member of
Split Britches Theater Company and has been awarded an OBIE Award for
Sustained Excellence of Performance and the Joseph Kesselring Prize for
Playwriting. She is the author of seven full-length solo performance
pieces, which she has performed Off-Broadway and throughout the United
States. She is currently at work on her eighth—which she will premiere
at MTSU for the Women’s Studies Interdisciplinary Conference.

“By talking too much, and using such obsessively elegant language,
Margolin removes herself from white privilege and power. She performs a
kind of Jewish excess, that marks her as affectively outside normative
whiteness. Her insistence on charting her own desire, and on calling
attention to her own body as a locus of sexual, emotional, and spiritual
feeling, also rejects a respectability that would disallow her to speak
in the first place.” -Jill Dolan

	Elyce Rae Helford, Conference Chair
Women’s Studies Program, Box 498
Middle Tennessee State University
Murfreesboro, TN 37132
telephone: (615) 898-5910 fax: (615) 898-5289
Email: womenstu at mtsu.edu <mailto:womenstu at mtsu.edu>
Visit the website at http://www.mtsu.edu/~womenstu
<http://www.mtsu.edu/%7Ewomenstu>