- Queering Parenting (Publication)
- Mothering, Violence, Militarism, War and Social Justice (Conference)
- Maternal Health and Well-Being (Publication)
- Mothering, Violence, Militarism and Social Justice (Conference)
- Being A Mother in Academe (Conference)
- The Future Landscape of Sexualities (Publication)
- Dyke Moms, Donor Dads, and Reconceiving the Queer Family (Publication)
1) CfP: Queering Parenting
edited by Susan Driver and Zoe Newman
collection of essays to be published by Demeter Press fall 2009
Deadline for papers is October 31, 2008
A proliferation of experientially based essays, media stories, documentary films, television profiles, photographic essays and do-it-yourself manuals featuring lesbian mothers and gay dads have emerged to mark out cultural discourses in which to understand lesbian and gay families. But while these images and narratives enable positive representations that counter invisibility and marginalization, they often work to delimit transformative mode of thinking and acting beyond normalizing categories. For LGBTTT2Q communities in Canada, the US, and Europe, family has been a site of struggle and invisibility, and has also been constructed as a site of transformation and pride, sometimes with the result that we have sidelined interrogations of how ‘queer families’ are normative and exclusionary. It is those troubling, ambiguous and unintelligible subjects that do not fit neatly into parental discourses that need to enter into public dialogues as part of a comprehensive project of queering parenting.
This book adopts a range of critically queer theoretical perspectives to rethink the parameters of parenting and family beyond heteronormative boundaries. Our goal is to engage with difficult knowledges and changing embodied parental experiences that include dynamic gender and sexual arrangements as they are lived through multi-layered racial, national and class relations. Rather than list those identities that fit into a queer paradigm we encourage a more pliable framework that explores the institutions, languages and contexts of parenting, complicating the ways powers shape alternatives to white middle-class heterosexual nuclear formations. Our interest is in fostering interpretive work on parenting that bridges articulations of intimate subjectivity, and analysis of broad social and historical forces that cumulatively impact what can be done and said in the name of diverse family relations.
We hope to include a range of styles of academic writing, and encourage interdisciplinary modes of analysis. The following topics interest us but they do not exhaust the horizon of our search:
- Transgender parenting within and beyond bi-gender mother and father roles
- Transnational queer parenting or transnational and queer critiques of the family
- Affective/psychic/embodied transformations of queer parenting
- Queering public/private and national boundaries of reproductivity
- The status of ‘queer’ as a strategic and heuristic tool of family life
- Parenting and sexualities
- Media representations and spectacles of queer families
- Alternative visual and artistic depictions of family life
- Racialization of queer family discourses
- Queering family law
- Queer interventions with reproductive technologies
- Reflecting on gay and lesbian self-help parenting texts
- Community based queer family activism and organizing
- Commodification of queer parenting and queer families
Deadline for papers is October 31, 2008. All papers must be MLA format (7000 word limit).
Please submit inquiries and comllete essays to both: sdriver#yorku.ca and znewman#yorku.ca
2) CfP: Mothering, Violence, Militarism, War and Social Justice – ARM’s FALL CONFERENCE
with embedded Motherhood Movement conference
October 23-26, 2008 at York University, Toronto, Canada.
For those who only sent title/affiliation information for our grant in April – PLEASE EMAIL YOUR 250 WORD ABSTRACT AND 50 WORD BIO TO arm#yorku.ca ASAP… http://www.yorku.ca/arm/MotheringViolence.html
Preliminiary program is now posted at: http://www.yorku.ca/arm/ARMpreliminaryconfprogram.pdf
3) CfP: Maternal Health and Well-Being Vol. 11.1 – ARM journal
for spring/summer 2009
http://www.yorku.ca/arm/vol11no1.html
4) CfP: Mothering, Violence, Militarism and Social Justice – ARM Conference 2008
with embedded Motherhood Movement Conference Oct 23-26, 2008
http://www.yorku.ca/arm/MotheringViolence.html
5) CfP: Andrea O’Reilly is Chairing a roundtable on the topic of Being A Mother in Academe for the 40th anniversary conference of the NeMLA in Boston, Feb 26-March 1, 2009
Deadline: September 1, 2008
If you are interested in being part of the roundtable please send a 250 word abstract and 50 word bio to
Andrea O’Reilly aoreilly#yorku.ca by September 1, 2008.
The Maternal Wall in Academe: Academic Mothers and Strategies of Resistance and Empowerment
In Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do about It Joan Williams argues that paid work in Western capitalist societies is organized by the concept of the “ideal worker”. This ideal worker, Williams writes, “works full time and overtime and takes little or no time off for childbearing or rearing” (1). When work is structured this way, Williams continues, “caregivers often can not perform as ideal workers” (1). The worker-caregiver dichotomy is, of course, gender codified: “men ‘naturally’ belong in the market because they are competitive and aggressive; women belong in the home because of their ‘natural’ focus on relationships and an ethic of care” (1). Over the last three decades as female paid labor participation increased, women, — at least the 90 plus percent who are mothers– are expected be perform as “ideal workers” in the workplace while simultaneously fulfilling the carework responsibilities of the home. With women still doing the bulk of household management – to include domestic labor, childcare, and the emotional and organizational work of creating and maintaining home, family and community, most mothers are unable to put in the extensive overtime hours that are required for advancement and success in most professions. Mothers thus find themselves “mommy tracked” making sixty cents for every dollar earned by full-time fathers (Williams, 2000, 2). Indeed, today the pay gap between mothers and non mothers under thirty-five years is now larger than the wage gap between young men and women (Crittenden, 94). And while the “glass ceiling” and the “sticky floor” are still to be found in the corporate structure, it is the maternal wall, most scholars argue, that impede and hinder most women’s progress in the workplace today.
William’s concept of a wall is an apt metaphor to describe the specific experiences of mothers in the workplace in that many women today, particularly those that are college educated, middle-class and professional, may not encounter gender discrimination until they become mothers and hit full throttle the maternal wall that blocks and blindsides them in their attempts at advancement. “Many childless women under the age of thirty five”, as Crittenden writes, “believe that all the feminist battles have been won” (88) But, as Crittenden continues, “once a woman has a baby, the egalitarian office party is over” (88).
The aim of this session is to explore the various strategies used by academic mothers as they encounter the maternal wall in academe.
INFO on NeMLA:
Northeast Modern Language Association 2009 Annual Convention
Boston, Massachusetts — February 26 – March 1, 2009
Celebrating 40 years! A regional MLA, NeMLA offers a vibrant yet more intimate conference experience. The 2008 Convention in Buffalo features more than 230 panels, covering all aspects of scholarship and teaching in the modern languages and literatures.
6) CfP: The Future Landscape of Sexualities
Deadline: June 20, 2008
** */thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory and culture*/*/* /invites contributions for its forthcoming issue on ‘The Future Landscape of Sexualities.’ Recognizing the central role which discussions of sexuality, identity, and culture have played in recent feminist scholarship, this issue will consider how sexuality informs gendered identities, as well as nodes of power including, race, class, ability, age, culture, nation, and religion. What does the future hold for human sexualities and sexual identities? How might current practices, assumptions, power relations, and identities shape these future sexualities? What new forms might sexualities evolve into in the future? How might these future sexualities transcend/reproduce current definitions of, and ideologies concerning, sexuality and sexual identity? Possible topics include:
- future utopic and dystopic sexualities
- role(s) of technologies (reproductive, virtual, synthetic) in the evolution and expression of sexuality
- the evolution of sex work
- queer sexualities
- inversions and convergences of sexuality and identity (including female masculinities and male femininities)
- the future of ‘normative’ masculinities and femininities
- sexualities and colour, sexualities and dis/ability, sexualities and age
- depictions of future sexualities in fiction, film, music, and art
Papers that ground speculation about the future with historical analyses of past transitions in sexualities are also welcome.
We welcome submissions from a wide range of disciplinary and geographical perspectives. Submissions from researchers working within, or among, the disciplines of geography, sociology, literature, area studies, cultural studies, film/media studies, art, history, education, law, and women’s/gender studies are particularly encouraged.
We accept the submission of work from scholars of any rank or affiliation, and encourage submissions from emerging feminist scholars, including graduate students.
All submissions to the journal must be submitted electronically through our online submission process. All submissions are peer-reviewed by established, senior feminist scholars. For more information on our publishing policies see: http://www.thirdspace.ca/journal/about/editorialPolicies
To submit: Please follow our online submission process at http://www.thirdspace.ca/journal/about/submissions**
Deadline: June 20, 2008. For more information, please contact us at info#thirdspace.ca
7) CfP: Dyke Moms, Donor Dads, and Reconceiving the Queer Family: An Anthology
Deadline for Submissions: September 15, 2008
You’re an out dyke about town. You meet someone, shack up, get a cat. You survive the non-monogamy negotiations and a renovation, get jobs in your fields, do lots of therapy, and decide it’s time to expand beyond your twosome into the world of parenthood. Being enterprising women with a solid do-it-yourself streak, you decide to forgo the impersonality and expense of a sperm bank and ask Tony, your gay friend from college, to donate some sperm to the cause. What could be simpler? A few months, a few syringes, some egg white and folic acid, a bit of awkwardness, and baby will make three.
Uh, make that four. Or five. Or maybe six. Because Tony (who, oddly, didn’t just miraculously vaporize as soon as the child was conceived) has a mother and a partner, both of whom want a relationship to the child. Like it or not, baby’s made something a lot more than what you bargained for. But what?
This anthology, to be published in Spring 2009 by Toronto’s Insomniac Press, will explore, through personal essays and first-person accounts, the phenomenon of lesbian couples (and the occasional single dyke) who choose a male friend or acquaintance, rather than an anonymous sperm donor, to father their children.
Submit!
With no clear models to follow, this new version of the queer family is creating its own. That’s where this anthology comes in. We are seeking stories that are funny, touching, heartbreaking, provocative, thoughtful — and very, very relevant to the new queer (and queer-positive) family.
We are looking for creative non-fiction and first-person accounts by lesbian mothers who have chosen known sperm donors in order to conceive; gay and straight men who have become sperm donors to lesbian mothers; their partners, their children, and other invested parties.
Submissions might explore (but should not be limited to) the following issues and themes:
When baby-making doesn’t take or takes too long; dealing with infertility, miscarriage, or even routine insemination is difficult enough for the average couple, so what happens when the donor also becomes emotionally involved? What happens when negotiations break down?
Can his parents come to visit? Is it rude to insist they stay in a hotel? With new family configurations come new questions of etiquette. How to deal gracefully (or at least sanely) with an often unexpected extended family.
The other mother: What happens to the experience of non-biological mothers when a biological „Dad“ is also part of the picture? Non-biological mothers in lesbian partnerships have long had to deal with issues of belonging and recognition in a society that is slow to recognize them as parents. Non-biological moms talk about the processes and challenges of claiming their roles as primary parents.
„Daddy“ doesn’t mean what it used to … How does the choice to become a donor redefine circles of gay male friends and the identities of gay men? From sperm count and motility to number of children fathered, the „donor“ phenomenon has sparked new concerns and conversations among gay men.
My husband is sleeping with lesbians! What does it mean when your partner is the father of the new baby — but the baby isn’t yours? From straight women who never thought they wanted kids to gay men who must put up with their boyfriends‘ new „focus,“ the new „donor“ family has far-reaching implications.
What if the birth changes everything? The donor who didn’t want to be overly involved is smitten with „his“ new son or daughter. On top of figuring out how to live with a newborn, the new moms must find a way to negotiate the demands of a relationship they didn’t realize they were entering into.
Gay divorce: What happens to the donor if the moms split up? What happens when the relationship between moms and donor deteriorates? To submit, send two double-spaced hard copies and an electronic copy on disc (in .rtf format) to the address below. Submissions should not exceed 15 pages or 7,500 words. Please left-justify your submission and use a serif font (e.g., Times New Roman) in 12-point size. Please include your name, address, telephone number, email address, and a brief bio (100 words). Submissions will not be returned. Emailed submissions will not be considered.
Deadline for Submissions: September 15, 2008
Contact us: Chloe Brushwood Rose & Susan Goldberg, Editors, Reconceiving Anthology <>
c/o Dr. Chloe Brushwood Rose
Faculty of Education
York University
4700 Keele Street
Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3
Canada
reconceivinganthology#gmail.com
www.insomniacpress.com
- STAY TUNED FOR MORE ARM NEWS….
Renée Knapp
Association for Research on Mothering (ARM)
Demeter Press
726 Atkinson, York University
4700 Keele Street
Toronto, ON,
Canada, M3J 1P3
416-736-2100 x60366 (fax) 416-736-5766
arm#yorku.ca
www.yorku.ca/arm
aus: ARM NEWS AND INFORMATION