[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: Women's Experiences of Justice (9/30/06; collection)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

CFP: Women's Experiences of Justice (9/30/06; collection)


The co-editors of (Re)Interpretations: The Shapes of Justice in Women's
Experience, to be published by Cambridge Scholars Press, Ltd. in late
2007, seek scholars interested in contributing a chapter. The book,
which will show how women create justice or resist injustice through
(re)interpretations of traditional structures, is divided into five
sections that represent patriarchal authority and power: Language,
Religion, Medicine, War, and Sex Trafficking.

Papers should be relatively jargon-free, accessible to a general
audience interested in issues of justice for women, but they should also
be well-grounded in scholarly research. A multicultural approach is
encouraged to cover issues in both the first and the third worlds.

Descriptions of the five sections follow, with suggestions for possible
topics:

Language

We construct our world through language, but language is also considered
a "man-made" symbolic order of reality that shapes our perceptions. If
it reflects men's reality, does it exclude women's reality? What are the
limiting and liberating powers of language? What paradigms are created
through language? How do women translate and interpret these paradigms?
How do women resist being silenced or insist on being heard when others
are doing the translating?


Religion

The three monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, form
the bedrock of Western culture and patriarchy, and religious
institutions are often blamed for continued oppression and
disempowerment of women. Trenchant feminist critiques of these religions
generally advocate an either/or view: accept the teachings or abandon
the religion altogether. This binary view neglects to account for
alternative views that suggest organized religion might be a site for
liberation struggles. In other words, feminism and religion are not
necessarily irreconcilable. The chapters in this section will raise
questions about how women can reclaim authority and advocate for a more
just world through religion and religious institutions.


Medicine

The medical field, dominated by male professionals, is fraught with
political and class struggles with significant consequences. Who claims
authority in medical issues? How is that authority established? Given
that medical practitioners today are often the ones who determine
sterility or fertility, life or death, sanity and insanity, how do women
negotiate the power struggles? In what ways are medical and related
institutions (pharmacology, insurance) responsible for the unfair
treatment of women, either through lack of intervention or through
intervention that labels women in specific and unjust ways? How are
women building on feminists' work in the 1970s to reclaim their power
and offer alternative, women-centered medical knowledge?


War

The interrelationships of war and social injustice are blatantly
obvious, but what is perhaps less obvious, particularly in the current
state of world affairs, is how military might still relies on
patriarchal ideologies in order to function. The glorification of
heroism and sacrifice and the eroticization of violence both devalue
women's roles in the military and diminish their sufferings and
exploitation. However, women's traditional relegation to service and
domestic roles does not necessarily make them innocent. In other words,
are women victims of war? Historical bystanders? Or are they, too,
implicated in the injustice of war? This section explores questions
about who is affected in war and how one's gender both contributes to
and compromises the "justness" of war.


Sex Trafficking

This section will explore definitions of trafficking: Who gets
trafficked and why? How and why are women and children cast as illegal
aliens that must be returned to their home countries rather than as
victims of crime that need safe houses, legal and physical protection
from their abusers? What are the issues involved in prosecuting
traffickers? What are the economic and social considerations, including
the effects of war and poverty?


__________________________________________________________________

500 word proposals are due by September 30, 2006 with a commitment to
have full papers completed by February 28, 2007.

Please send your proposals, with a short biography, to Lisa Dresdner at
Ldresdner at ncc.commnet.edu <mailto:Ldresdner at ncc.commnet.edu>  or to
Laurel Peterson at LPeterson at ncc.commnet.edu
<mailto:LPeterson at ncc.commnet.edu> .

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