Feminist and Gender Studies in a Global Perspective

deadline for submissions: 
June 30, 2017
full name / name of organization: 
Namaste Educational Academy -- http://sahitya.namasteeducationalacademy.org/

FEMINIST & GENDER STUDIES IN A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE:

  Since the early 1980s when a number of feminists, including Chandra Mohanty in her essay “Under Western Eyes” urged critics to examine the interplay of the local and the global and to expose the power-relations – both historical and contemporary – in discussions of postcolonial and global feminisms, there has been an increased emphasis on understanding “global feminism” through the intersecting aspects of race, class, gender and through colonialism and anticolonial forms of nationalism. Of late, emerging feminisms and gender studies as interconnecting disciplines, have tried to incorporate the pluralities,temporality and constructedness of all identities in a shifting discourse of changing power and resistance. Identity politics based on such precarious foundations are undermined even more by the rise of nationalism. But the query is how global feminism and gender studies can, continue to offer their valuable critiques given the rise of new nationalisms across the globe, nationalisms that threaten the formation of cross-border collectivities and alignments? And might the growing class, ethnic, and religious tensions within nations impede the solidarity that global perspectives regarding feminist and gender studies seek to forge? Who gets to set the framework for these debates, and which perspectives are elided when we fail to take into account the positionality of the critic? Can global perspectives on feminism and gender alter perceptions of masculinity and male gender? Similarly, in a changing global scenario, how and where do we place indigenous/aboriginal/subaltern women’s narratives and how do new alignments of nationalism represent LGBTQ and sexuality? Finally how does the global become personal? Are there feminisms of everyday life that can address or attend to the larger global issues that construct gender and sexuality? The aim of this conference is to re-view and re-frame these and related questions from a wide range of disciplinary and multidisciplinary fields, such as literature, philosophy, history, sociology and so on.

The conference organizers seek papers from scholars exploring various subjects, including (but not limited to) the following:

  • Academic institutions and Work places.
  • Body politics, masculinity and sexuality studies.
  • Civil society and Human rights.
  • Diaspora/transnationalism and Translation
  • Feminist and Gender theories/Methodologies for a global world
  • Indigenous/Aboriginal/Subaltern narratives
  • Feminist historiographies
  • Literature, art, media, Popular art and Consumerism
  • Neoliberalism, feminism and gender
  • Social movements, Women’s writing and Political activism