CFP: Precarious Spaces: (Dis-) Locating Gender

Precarious Spaces: (Dis-) Locating Gender

The 18th Annual Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies 

Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the University of Rochester

March 24th & 25th, 2011

Keynote Speaker:

*Laura Kipnis*

Professor of Radio/Television/Film, Northwestern University

The Susan B. Anthony Institute at the University of Rochester is pleased to announce the 18th Annual Gender and Women's Studies Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, which will take place March 24th and 25th, 2011. The Conference Committee is currently seeking paper proposals. Each year the SBAI conference features considerations of gender, sexuality, and women's studies from varied disciplinary fields. These include (but are not limited to) art, art history, cultural studies, education, film, history, geography, law, literary studies, linguistics, media studies, medicine, music, philosophy, and political science. The conference aims to foster an environment of interdisciplinary communication, knowledge exchange, and collaboration.


The nucleus of this year’s conference is to query the ways in which gender/sexuality and space operate as intersecting domains of intelligibility and mutual projects of precariousness. By "precarious spaces" one might think of risky positions, contested territories, unstable conditions, or unsafe environments. Ideally encompassing a wide-swath of terrain—that would include theory and praxis—we would like to invite graduate students to present research that addresses questions such as: How might the sexualized body become a locus of mapping and/or zoning? What function might borderlands or simulated spaces have in the re-articulation of gendered/sexualized identities? Why do certain localities—from the exigencies of the immediate, to the "global"—get rendered in a singularly gendered rhetoric? Are notions of the private versus public divide still immersed in a negotiation of gender norms? Can heteronormative space be effectively "queered"? How do spatial-gendered determinations and liminalities manifest themselves in language, representation, law, and social policy? Please view these questions as mere loci of entry, and not determinative of successful submissions.


Research topics relevant to this year’s theme might include the following keywords, though this list is far from exhaustive:

· Architecture
· Affect (the emotional resonances of space)
· The body
· Décor/interiorities
· Literature
· Performance/exhibition
· Histories of space making
· Medicine
· Pedagogy
· Notions of the "urban" versus the "rural"
· Constructions of private vs. public spheres
· "Safe" spaces versus spaces of conflict
· Counter-publics (“transgendered”/“queered" spaces)
· Discourses of "nation" and "empire"
· Borders
· Diaspora
· Geography
· Mapping/cartography
· The "interstitial"/"borderlands"
· Extra-territoriality
· Imagined/represented/simulated space
· Zoning

Submission Details:

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to Matthew Bayne, at bayne.matthew@gmail.com. Presentations will be limited to 20 minutes, including audio-visual demonstrations. In your email, please provide contact information, a brief biographical statement, and any audio-visual or technological equipment needed for your presentation. Submissions are due no later than January 21, 2011. You will receive the committee’s decision by February 4, 2011.