Call for Papers: Queer Spaces/ Gender, Sexuality and Urban Spaces

Deadline: 2 December 2010

Find below information about the upcoming Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies graduate student conference. Please forward this widely to your students and colleagues, and we look forward to the exciting conversations ahead! For more information and to access the online submission form, contact gcws@mit.edu or go to the web site: http://web.mit.edu/gcws/Grad_conference_2011/index_Intro_2011.html

GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND URBAN SPACES

A graduate student conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

March 11th and 12th, 2011

CALL FOR PAPERS

Urban spaces both produce and are produced by gender. The Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies conference, Gender, Sexuality and Urban Spaces, seeks to explore the reciprocity of these complex relationships. We are interested in how life (or living) in urban spaces mark as well as produce gendered and sexed bodies and how gender, class and race relations, performances and sexualities, in turn, make their marks on the urban spaces. By urban spaces, we mean the lived practices and representations through which a variety of spaces are constituted within and beyond the scope of the city. We invite submissions that examine the construction of gender and sexuality (in conjunction with race, class, & mobility) and urban spaces across a range of historical, cultural, national, fictional, and conceptual contexts.

From census surveys, subway maps, and zoning laws to post-apocalyptic narratives, the construction of sexualities, gender relations, performances, and gendered bodies in urban spaces has been robustly imagined, documented, and regulated. Keeping in mind the rich interdisciplinarity suggested by these approaches, this conference seeks to address the following questions:

• How have evolving conceptions of gender and sexuality altered the city in the past, present, and future?
• How has the city altered conceptions of gender / sexuality?
• How have understandings of gender / sexuality shaped the material and social / cultural spaces of the city?
• How do gender / sexuality impact access to urban spaces and why?
• How are conceptions of gender and sexuality reinforced, challenged, or subverted through gendered / sexed bodies and the urban spaces they inhabit?
  

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Spatial Dynamics of the City
• Built and Natural Urban Environments
• Public and Private Spaces
• Access: to Institutions, to Policy, to Geographies, etc.
• Feminist Practices in the city
• Migration, Immigration, and the City
• Transportation and Mobility
• Urban Aesthetics
• Queer Spaces
• Gender and Technologies
• Institutions and Gender
• Urban Activism
• Tourism and Gender
• Intersectionality and the City
• Visual and Textual Representations
  

Please submit 250-word abstracts for 15-minute individual presentations or a proposal for a complete panel of three papers with a 100-word panel abstract and paper abstracts of 150 words each. Submit proposals online or E-mail to gcws@mit.edu by December 2nd, 2010. All submissions should include 3-5 sentence biographical statements for all paper presenters, which include current research interests and institutional affiliation(s). Please note all AV needs you will have in an additional paragraph.

ONLINE SUBMISSION FORM: http://web.mit.edu/gcws/Grad_conference_2011/index_Grad_2011.html

Accepted participants will be notified via e-mail by January 7th, 2011.

More information here.

This blog is no longer updated. Please instead visit Writers For Diversity for new opportunities for women/ LGBT writers and writers of color. Thank you.