Deadline October 1, 2007
Aspasia is an international and peer-reviewed yearbook that seeks to bring out the best scholarship in the field of interdisciplinary women’s and gender history focusing on, and especially produced in Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe. This issue of Aspasia will be dedicated to the practice of everyday life, to themes linked to the lived, everyday aspects of gender identity. In particular, we are interested in submissions that address the following questions: How have broad institutional frameworks – religious, social, economical, political, and cultural – related to the ways in which average women and men shaped their gender identities? And vice versa: how have (changes in) gender identities and relations influenced broader institutional frameworks and fostered the development of particular lifestyles and divisions between work and recreation/leisure/entertainment?
More specifically, how have religious institutions’ assumptions about gender norms shaped the religious practices and spirituality of lay women and men? How have sexual norms impacted how women and men perform and negotiate their sexual identity? How have specific marital traditions, such as patrilocality, influenced how women and men relate to each other in couples, and how gender is understood in small local communities? How have modern economic processes changed economic empowerment along gender lines? How have commercial practices challenged or secured specific understandings of gendered work and identities? What changes did state socialism bring to women’s and men’s gender identities and daily lives, and how did that change over time (through the impact of industrialization, urbanization, an economy of scarcity, etc.)?
These and other questions that engage with the lived, everyday aspects of femaleness and maleness, femininities and masculinities in Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe (CESEE), represent the broad focus of Aspasia’s next issue. In all cases we are interested in how gender intersected with other categories of identity and social organization – class, ethnicity, nationality, location, age, and sexuality – in shaping the history of everyday life.
Contributions could highlight specific case studies, be more broadly comparative, or address issues pertaining to the methodologies and theoretical underpinnings for working on these aspects of historical research and analysis. They can deal with all historical periods.
Overall, we are interested in innovative essays, both in approach and in focus, so long as they remain anchored in the regional context and gender analysis that are the foundation of our yearbook.