CfP for a session at the 2017 Conference of the Coalition of Women in German (WiG) (Web)

Time: Oct. 26-29, 2017
Venue: Banff, Alberta, Canada
Proposals by: March 1, 2017

Mobility is one of the factors that defines people in concrete ways. For example, mobile practices define pedestrians, drivers, and pilots; motivational forces define refugees, immigrants, and tourists. Ideology can also define mobile identities. Historically, pilgrims, explorers, tourists and participants on a Grand Tour have been linked to aristocracy, Bildung, personal enrichment, religious devotion, and leisure, and these types of mobilities have been widely perceived and depicted as positive. Similarly, the contemporary focus on globalization and transnationalism has led to a more positive reception of mobile forms of identities and challenged the claims to authenticity and “rootedness” at the core of traditional notions of place-based identities. In this context, sedentariness has become more and more labeled with negative connotations while “placelessness” has become reconceived in more positive terms such as open, perpetually becoming, and a manifestation of the permeability of boundaries. Nonetheless, throughout history there have been many forms of mobilities that have been ideologically defined as transgressive or deviant and marginalized, such as so-called wandering Jews, hobos, drifters, vagabonds, and guest workers. Often hidden in the critiques and marginalization of particular types of mobilities are assumptions about gender, sexuality, race, citizenship, and other socially constructed categories.

Within the framework of feminist German Studies, this panel solicits contributions that explore the representation of the relationship between mobilities and identity-formation across all media. We are particularly interested in papers that focus on the intersection of mobility with race, gender, and sexuality.

Papers could address such topics as:

• Intersectionality and mobility
• Mobile practices, mobile identities
• Movements across natural, political, and cultural boundaries
• Embodiment, health, and mobile identities
• Time, mobility, and identity
• Authenticity, rootedness, belonging
• Deviance and transgression
• Landscapes of mobility and identity
• Systems of circulation, flow, dynamism and identity
• Notions of placelessness and no-place
• Gendering and racialization of motion and mobility
• Globalization and transnationalism
• Diasporic identities
• Other types of mobilities (social, cultural, political, ideological) and identity formation
• Mobility and performativity
• Military mobilities and mobilities of conquest

Please submit a 200-300 word abstract and brief bio by March 1, 2017 to panel organizers Liesl Allingham (lialling@sewanee.edu) and Stefanie Ohnesorg (ohnesorg@utk.edu).

Stefanie Ohnesorg, Associate Professor of German
Dept. of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures
University of Tennessee
701 McClung Tower
Knoxville, TN 37996-0470
Phone: 865-974-7098
E-Mail: ohnesorg@utk.edu

Quelle: Female-l