Call for papers: Workshop on Gender and Materiality in European History

11-12 june, 2009, University of Groningen, Netherlands

http://www.siefar.org/ActuCol09-06Groningen.htm

Papers might address such questions as:
· How does gender shape the way human beings have inhabited or manipulated the environment?
· In what ways have discourses and practices of gender shaped material culture, consumption, and the consumer revolution?
· By what mechanisms, practices, and politics has the material been gendered?
· What are the social and political implications of the gendering of the material - from the gendering of the body to the gendering of consumer goods and lived space?
· How does gender intersect materially with other dimensions of human experience and identity such as race, religion, or nationality?
· How does the material make gender visible? How does the visual make gender material?
· How might theoretical work in allied disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, art history, or philosophy help us to understand gender and the material historically?
· Are there specific critiques of histories of materiality that a gender perspective might fruitfully raise? What new insights does a focus on the material generate about the mechanisms and operations of gender in history?

For decades Marxist approaches to history gave material interests a determining role, while feminist approaches challenged biological determinism. These two very different conceptions of the material suggest the multiplicity of meanings and locations of the material in history, but they also share a narrow focus on the question of determinism. In recent years, historians have begun to rethink the material dimension of history in new ways that challenge simple determinism, but often without attention to the workings of gender. For this workshop we invite scholars to explore broadly the relationship between the material and the cultural in European history while challenging them to put gender at the center of analysis.

This new materialism might include environmental history and the history of landscape, the history of the body and sexuality, histories of technology, studies of consumption and the consumer revolution, and the study of material culture more generally. Histories of the book and of the relationship between books and texts as more than simply that of "material support," are also welcome. Visual culture, and maps in particular, also call upon us to think about the material world in new ways, as does the study of space: both the environment (man-made and natural) and the ways in which people move through it. What would the public sphere look like from a material perspective? How is privacy constituted materially?

The workshop will be hosted by Dena Goodman, holder of the Jantina Tammes Chair for Gender Studies of the University of Groningen during the spring semester of 2009. Affiliated with the University of Michigan as Professor of History and Women's Studies, she has published extensively on gender in early modern culture in general, and the French Enlightenment in particular. Her best-known publication is/ The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment/ (Ithaca 1994).

The workshop will be held 11-12 June 2009 at the University of Groningen. Please submit proposals before 1 December 2008 to m.w.a.van.tilburg@rug.nl.

Further information can be obtained at m.w.a.van.tilburg@rug.nl (CGS) or m.t.b.wubbolts@rug.nl (OGWG)