Homes and Homecomings: A Special Issue of Gender & History edited by Karen Adler
In the 1970s, feminists in western Europe and north America demanded that normalised understandings of the home, and women’s apparent fittedness for confinement in the domestic environment, be thoroughly dismantled. This in part revived the earlier bourgeois feminist rejection of women’s captivity in domestic marriage. Meanwhile, contemporary theorists have made much of the ‚unhomely condition of the modern world‘, associating modernity and postmodernity with increasing displacement from spaces that might be considered ‚home‘. These observations take us so far, but what insights might gender histories be able to bring to considerations of ‚the home‘ and the ‚homely‘? In particular, how might we historicise the idea of
‚being at home‘?
This Special Issue of the international journal, Gender & History, will revisit and look anew at questions about ‚the home‘ and ‚homeliness‘ and their gendered and historical implications. It aims to bring together historians, cultural geographers, architectural and visual historians, and ask them to explore gendered ideas of the home as both domestic and national spaces and, crucially, spaces – imagined, archival, material – where both these ideas might interact.
We welcome original articles in all areas and periods, including those with illustrations (permissions to be secured by the author). We are also keen to receive work on areas and periods that have had less exposure in Gender & History, such as, though not limited to, Middle Eastern history, Jewish history, antiquity, medieval and early modern history, and histories of ‚the south‘. Scholars working in other areas are equally welcome to submit proposals.
The volume does not propose to rehearse the well-worn territory of ’separate spheres‘. It seeks instead to reflect on new configurations of the domestic, and how historians can visit and understand these locations in the past. It wants to explore the meanings of homes during and after major conflict, and the return home, as well as homes as a constituent part of conflict itself. What sort of new understandings of homelessness might be found, and where do questions of masculinity figure?
It also wants to understand homes on regional, national and transnational scales. What kind of framework does home and homecoming provide for thinking about diaspora, exile, migration, refuge or asylum as processes of coming, rather than leaving, home? What are the gendered implications of demands to reclaim home and homes?
The Special Issue is due to be published in 2009 and to appear in 2010 as a book. All articles published in Gender & History undergo full anonymous peer review.
Articles should be about 9,000 words and conform to the Gender & History style: see http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0953-5233
Proposals of 300 words should be sent to genderandhistory@nottingham.ac.uk
by 31 July 2007. Those submitting successful proposals will be invited to present their articles at a conference to be held in Nottingham, Great Britain, in early 2008.
Dr Karen Adler, FRHistS
Editor, Gender & History
School of History
University of Nottingham
Nottingham NH7 2RD
Tel: +44 115 951 5933