Governors State University Announces the 5th Annual Gender Matters Conference

Time: April 17-18, 2015
Venue: University Park, Illinois
Submission Deadline: 2 January 2015

Gender Matters is an academic conference highlighting research on gender, women, and sexuality across all disciplines and historical periods. Conference planners seek to bring together scholars, researchers, activists, practitioners, and students to discuss the ongoing role of gender in structuring society. We invite submissions for individual papers, panels, performances, workshops, films/videos, and posters.

This year’s theme ‚All in the Family?‘ focuses our attention on the many ways that

gender shapes and is shaped by notions, structures, practices, performances, and representations of “family” broadly defined. While conference planners invite work on all matters related to gender, we are particularly interested in work that problematizes the concept of family and examines it in local, transnational, and global contexts and through multiple lenses.

Potential topics for proposals include, but are not limited to, questions such as:

• How do representations of family in popular culture reify, expand, transform our understandings of gender? How do institutional and symbolic changes in family interrelate?
• What does a queer, postmodern family look like? How is family performed?
• How might recent institutional changes (such as rulings allowing same-sex marriage) change the gendered nature of this (too?) long-term family arrangement?
• How do (material/imagined/virtual/fictional/representational/religious) families act as sites for constructing gender and sexual identities? For constructing systems of power? For fomenting resistance?
• How do social media create new “families of choice”? How do they function to discipline/surveil family behavior?
• How have emigration/immigration, remittances, and long-distance/long-term separation of children and parents shaped families?
• How has the mass incarceration of darker, poorer, predominantly male people affected families?
• Who’s taking care of whom? How is caregiving raced, classed, and gendered? What generational patterns have emerged?
• How does the gendered division of labor shape family relations? How does the Global North/Global South division of labor shape the family?
• Do sexual divisions of labor in the family inherently generate inequalities?
• How do families support or deny women’s power over their bodies, sexual activity, and reproductive choices?
• How have the increased participation of women in the military, the increase in multiple call-ups, and the high rate of serious injuries, including PTSD, affected families? How has the high rate of sexual assault in the military affected the response to the military’s self-characterization as family?
• In what ways are the causes and consequences of the many refugee crises (in Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Gaza, Mexico, Arizona, etc.) gendered?
• How is violence within families and communities and between families and communities gendered? How are responses to that violence gendered?

We also welcome proposals on topics not related to this year’s theme, but dealing with gender and/or sexuality, including those on teaching gender and/or sexuality.

Plenary speakers and performers will be announced on the website.

Submission guidelines and forms can be found at: http://www.govst.edu/gendermatters beginning Oct. 17, 2014. Please note that only submissions adhering to the stated guidelines will be accepted.

For individual papers, individual performances, or posters, please submit a title page with complete author contact information; an abstract of no more than 250 words; and a brief biography (no more than 75 words). Paper panels will be organized into groups of three or four.

For panels, films/videos, or group performances, please submit a rationale and description (no more than 500 words), including its format (paper presentations, roundtable discussion, type of exhibit or performance, workshop); contact information for all presenters; an abstract of no more than 250 words for each presenter’s work; and a brief biography (no more than 75 words) of each presenter.

Please direct inquiries to gendermatters@govst.edu.

Important Dates

Submissions Website Available: 17 October 2014

Submission Deadline: 2 January 2015

Acceptance Notifications: 30 January 2015

Early Registration Deadline: 27 February 2015 ($25 students; $55 regular)

Registration Deadline: 20 March 2015 ($40 students; $70 regular)

Gender Matters Conference: 17-18 April 2015 (Friday and Saturday)

Source: H-Net