Australian Women’s History Network (AWHN)’s Symposium (Web) as a part of the 2015 Australian Historical Association conference ‘Foundational Histories’
Time: Wednesday 8 July 2015
Venue: University of Sydney
Proposals not later than 28.02.2015
Just over three decades ago, Jill Julius Matthews published Good and Mad Women: The historical construction of femininity in twentieth century Australia (1984), her path-breaking feminist history. This important book pre-dated Joan W. Scott’s proclamation of gender as a ‘useful category of historical analysis’ (1986) and continues to be influential. The Australian Women’s History Network celebrates the book’s anniversary by calling for papers that historicise gender and/or reflect on the historiography of gender. In particular we seek work that aims to trace and analyse – as Matthews did in Good and Mad Women – ‘the specific meaning and experience of becoming a woman’, whether in 20th-century Australia or elsewhere in time and place.
The symposium also offers a platform for speakers – individually or on panels – to revisit classic works of gender history, examining how these were foundational and for whom, or to survey contemporary currents in gender history. The AWHN welcomes broad engagement with the field of gender history; other possible topics and themes include:
- Gender and sexualities
- Gender in cross-cultural comparison
- Gender, politics and resistance
- Transgender
- Feminist critiques of gender
- Gender and embodiment
- Gender, race and ethnicity
- Men and masculinities
- Gender and pleasure
- Class and gender
- Gender and colonialism; gender and nationalism.
The AWHN Symposium will be held on Wednesday 8 July as part of the 2015 Australian Historical Association conference ‘Foundational Histories’ to be held at the University of Sydney 6-10 July 2015. The keynote speaker will be Professor Jill Matthews. The annual general meeting will be held at lunch time with a reception and dinner to follow the symposium.
Please submit abstracts of no more than 200 words (for individual papers and panels) to the symposium convenor Zora Simic at z.simic@unsw.edu.au by 28 February 2015. Please send as word or RTF files with an author bio of no more than 50 words. Papers that are not selected as part of the AWHN program will be considered for the AHA program. Each paper will run for twenty minutes with ten minutes for question time. Panels are allocated 90 minutes in total.
The Australian Women’s History Network is convened by Sharon Crozier-de Rosa (University of Wollongong), Vera Mackie (University of Wollongong) and Zora Simic (University of New South Wales). The Network can be contacted at auswhn@gmail.com The Network’s journal is Lilith: A Feminist History Journal.