JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies (Web)

Proposals by: 31.01.2023

Discourses on gender relations worldwide presuppose that all women have occupied subordinate positions since the beginning of time in both public and private spheres due to patriarchy. From historical evidence in African societies, gender relations seem to lean more toward complementarity than the patriarchy. In this volume, patriarchy will be broadly defined as the unequal distribution of power between men and women that oppresses, discriminates, and subordinates women, and defines complementarity as a culture that emphasizes a relationship between men and women, which stresses the importance of partnership. The editors do not subscribe to a North Africa/Sub-Saharan Africa split and will welcome submissions on topics from across the Continent.
Articles that examine gender relations from a multidisciplinary perspective will be accepted, particularly those that explore continuity and change in African gender relations and women’s experiences in Africa since pre-colonial times. Rather than assuming the existence and prevalence of patriarchy in the African context, it would be essential to problematize the meaning of patriarchy and complementarity as a word and a concept.
Others include (but are not limited to) a comparative analysis of the status of women in Africa; how might cultural and social practices of African societies challenge contemporary discourse on the subject? Is patriarchy a colonial concept? How might this advance what we know historically and contemporarily about patriarchy in Africa concerning African women? Therefore, this call calls on researchers to explore patriarchy and complementarity from the pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial eras. The second issue broadens our scope to include the African diaspora. How might the transnational experience impact African women’s experience of Continue reading →

Juliane Tomann (Public History, Univ. Regensburg) and Karin Reichenbach (Leibniz-Institute for History and Culture of Eastern Europe – GWZO) (Web) // (PDF)

Time: 02.-03.03.2023
Venue: Leipzig
Proposals by: 15.12.2022

Whenever history – as a narrative about the past – is displayed, performed, or staged publicly, gender is performed as well. Memory studies have already acknowledged the strong intersections of memory and gender and reflected on the question of how gender shapes memory (Penkwitt and Moos 2007; Paletschek and Schraut 2008; Reading 2016; Altınay et al 2019). Studies in the broad field of public history have thus far largely focused on institutions like museums and historic sites and have analyzed the ways in which they display and represent gender (Muttenthaler and Wonisch 2006; Spanka 2019; Vinitzky-Seroussi and Dekel, 2019). By addressing the ways we do history and the practices of reviving, restaging, recreating, citing, and emulating past events in the present, this workshop will rather shift the focus towards bottom-up or do-it-yourself, ephemeral, and performative modes of public history. It will mainly address such forms that hinge on embodiment, immersive, affective, and experiential approaches, which in turn highlight playful, corporal, multi-sensory and personal engagements with the past. Thus, the workshop focusses on constructing and creating meanings of the past that lie outside but are not unrelated to academic history and archaeology and further sheds light on the effective power history performances may have on the production of historical knowledge and on transformations of historical awareness in public audiences. Additionally, it stresses the connection of doing history and doing gender. The concept of doing gender was first established by Candace West and Don Zimmerman as early as the 1980s and emphasized the notion of gender as a routine embedded in everyday interaction (West and Zimmerman 1987). Judith Butler further stressed the performative and constructivist aspects of gender as a historical and reflexive concept (Butler 1990; 2004). Read more and source … (Web)