2011 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women (Web)

Time: June 9-12 2011
Place: University of Massachusetts in Amherst
Source: H-WOMEN@H-NET.MSU.EDU

Call for Panel

• Representations of Race and Gender on the Global Stage; DL: 15.03.2010

I am seeking a chair for our panel for Berks 2011. The panel, „Representations of Race and Gender on the Global Stage,“ explores the different uses to which raced and gendered performances have been put across space and time. I have included the panel abstract below. If you are interested in serving as chair for this panel, please contact me off-list as soon as possible. The deadline for panel submissions is March 15.

Thank you,
Heather Cooper
Ph.D. student, University of Iowa

Panel Title: Representations of Race and Gender on the Global Stage
Commentator: Jennifer D. Brody, Duke University

Panel Abstract: Performances and/or representations of race and gender have been critical to the process through which individuals and societiesconstruct their understandings of themselves and of the “other.”

This panel examines the divergent uses to which raced and gendered performances have been put by different groups across space and time.

In “Remembering Slavery/Forging Freedom in the Post-bellum U.S.,” Heather Cooper examines the post-bellum narratives of ex-slave women in order to understand how these women used autobiography to present nuanced conceptions of slavery and emancipation and a positive image of black womanhood to the public.

In “Gender and Generations of Identity in Sauk Portraits,” Jane Simonsen studies the contested meanings attached to photographic representations of the Sauk tribe in the American mid-west at the turn of the twentieth century.

She finds that the Sauk used images originally constructed for a white audience (and accompanied by a white narrative of Sauk history) to construct their own gendered history of displacement and cultural change.

Finally, in “The Silence of Race, the Gender of Speech,” Anastasia Kayiatos examines how Russian representations of “blackness” from the 1950s to the 1970s rendered African and African-American subjects as linguistic and political primitives. These disempowering raced and gendered performances of “blackness” were used to justify the Second World’s paternalistic approach to newly decolonized nations in the Third World.

As these brief descriptions make clear, raced and gendered performances were critical sites for the assertion and/or negotiation of power.

Looking at such performances in a “global” context allows us to see the different strategies of representation and performance that individuals and groups employed, the ways in which group identities were renegotiated at important moments of change across time and space, and the continued significance of gender to understanding identity, the social and cultural construction of race, and complex and contested relationships of power.

Contact: heatherlyc@yahoo.com