09.02.2007

CALL FOR PAPERS

AFTER EMPIRE: GENDER BOUDARIES AS THE BORDERS OF NATIONS

June 28-30, 2007

European Humanities University
Centre for Gender Studies
Center for Advanced Studies and Education Research project "Social
Transformations in the Border region - Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova"

Vilnius, Lithuania

This conference is the joint project of the Centre for Gender Studies and Research project "Social Transformations in the Border region - Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova" at the European Humanities University. Its specific focus is on this borderland region, though the inclusion of other borderlands is expected to enrich and contextualize the topic. Conference organizers see “borderlands” as a special space, where political, cultural, and economic transformations may be fragmented and characterized by diverse and even contradicting strategies, as the social actors compete for the inclusion in or joining with the “powerful centers” on both sides of the border. 

This conference aims to explore the critical link between the ideas and practices of gender, on the one hand, and “nationbuilding” on the other, in Eastern/Central Europe and Eurasia. We tend to focus on the dynamics of this relationship during two separate, but related periods. One is the time of the “awakening of nations”, which was finalized in the nation-states on the edges of the three Eurasian Empires after WWI, or “national” administrative units in the USSR. The second period, which started after 1989 (or 1991), also implies rethinking of  “national” and regional identities in the post-communist space. Social, economic, political, and cultural transformations in East/Central Europe resulted in the new geopolitical configurations and regions, which are “in-between” the European (or some other), as well as post-Soviet space.

National and gender identities are inseparable and interrelated, and the practices used to “naturalize” gender differences and hierarchies in nationalist and statehood projects are of special interest. Gender and nation as social constructions largely result from «oppositions» or «delineations»; they become especially highlighted at the lines of “passage” or crossing the boundaries/borders. The notion of  «borderlands,” borders, and boundaries, both geographical and social, is a key one for the conference.

Conference organizers are hoping for an interdisciplinary academic debate of the interception of gender, empire, nationbuilding, and borders within the following topical areas:

Etching the edges of Europe: borderlands as gendered space;
Empire and gender order;
nation, citizenship, masculinity and femininity;
“national motherhood” and patriotic masculinity;
gendered iconography of the national idea;
women’s bodies and nation’s boundaries;
gendered spaces of national politics;
nationalism, sexuality, militarism;
intellectual women in national movements;
gendering national memories;
national church» and gender order;
empire, nation, reproduction, and welfare;
«as a woman, I have no nation»: feminism vs. nationalism;
nationalism and post-Soviet masculinity;
welfare and nationbuilding;
migration, mixed marriages, trafficking.

Conference languages are the regional lingua franca of  Russian and English.

Proposals for individual papers or complete panels can be sent to gender@ehu.lt Please include your contact information, brief CV and paper description of up to 250 words. The deadline is April 15, 2007; acceptance notification by May 1, 2007.