WOMEN’S AND GENDER HISTORY SYMPOSIUM
The 19th annual Women’s and Gender History Symposium at UIUC seeks graduate papers that confront the question of difference through a focus on the movement, action, regulation, representation, and surveillance of, and/or contestations over, the body. We are particularly interested in considering the ways that categories of gendered, sexual, and racial difference are constantly made and unmade in arenas of power, through struggles between socially advantaged and disadvantaged groups over representations and practices relating to the body. This is to take seriously the role of historically marginalized subjects–women, LGBTQ people, immigrants, indigenous people, people of color, and others–in rendering grammars of difference fluid and unstable through actions that undermine or expose normative fictions designed to legitimate logics of exclusionary violence. We welcome papers that approach these processes from the ground level, focusing on themes such as mobility, intimacy, cross-cultural encounters, and productive and reproductive labor.