Session at CAA 2021: Valentina Rozas-Krause and Andrew M. Shanken (Web)

Venue: NYC
Time: 10.-13.02.2021
Proposals by: 16.09.2020

To say that women are under-represented in public space is a gross understatement: less than 7% of the existing monuments in the US recognize women. In response, cities are currently grappling with the striking gender disparity of their commemorative infrastructure by adding new monuments. This trend recapitulates the fact that women are under-represented in society, in history and in places of power, while it also assumes that one way to address the deficit is through memorialization.

Yet we all know how fraught memorialization is. Memorials are frequently victims of iconoclasm. In fact, memorials have been under near constant assault, from the statue-phobia of the 19th century through the counter-monument movement of the 20th century. Do we want to subject women–or women’s memory–to these same problems? Do we want an army of dead white women to counter these dead white men?

The question goes beyond women. The session seeks to understand the under-represented in memorialization, both diachronically and across cultures. Speakers could consider issues of gender, race, and otherness, as well as materiality, style, context, and history. They might further consider the public display of female and queer bodies and its relationship to a long history of white male bodies; and the historical relationship between the representation of allegorical and actual women. Moving beyond subject matter, how have women as memory activists shaped the commemorative landscape? We welcome papers across historical eras and geographical contexts that place commemorative representation in tension with feminism, queer studies and new materialism.

To submit a proposal, please follow instructions on the CAA Annual Conference CFP page (Link). Deadline for submission is September 16, 2020.

Valentina Rozas-Krause, University of Michigan and Andrew M. Shanken: Email Addresss: vrozas@umich.edu, ashanken@berkeley.edu.

Source: H-Net Notifications