2025 MMLA theme "The Humanities is Where Hope Lives"

Gender Studies

Panel Title “Hope for Voice and Gender” – Virtual Panel

Maybe love is like rain. Sometimes gentle, sometimes torrential,

flooding, eroding, quiet, steady, filling the earth, collecting in hidden springs.

When it rains, when we love, new life grows.

—Carol Gilligan, The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love (232)

During turbulent times of social, political, and cultural change, executive orders are placed to eradicate differences than celebrate their uniqueness. On shifting the paradigm, Carol Gilligan argues that equal voice is the condition for love and democracy and in the absence of voice, we cannot deal with conflict in a relationship as it is only resolved in domination.

Voices are to be valued and met with resonance by what Carol Gilligan calls, Radical Listening through actively seeking where voices come from. Yet not all voices are heard. Navigating the voices that are internally spoken within us versus the voices that are spoken to us from the outside, the panel seeks for voices that seek for community and transformation. The Gender Studies panel asks how the dynamics of gender affect the distortions of voices, responsibility of the transformation, and communication and reading of people’s needs during difficult times of exclusion of identities. With ethics of care in mind, the panel asks presenters to address communication of support and hope that focus on empathy, relationships, and connection.

This permanent panel welcomes discussions on queer voices and pedagogy on such topics below but not limited to:

•           Activism and political movements

•           Collective Ecologies

•           Discrimination and segregation

•           Drag and Crossdressing

•           Erotica and Pornography

•           Feminist collectives and Transfeminisms

•           Gender characterization in literature

•           Gender in linguistics and its implications

•           Gendered writing and genres

•           Material ownership and publishing

•           Nationality and citizenship

•           Natural science and ethics of care

•           Politics of Representation

•           Popular culture and subgenres

•           Race and ethnicity

•           Sexuality, sensuality, pain, pleasure, and desire

•           Transcultural Literary Negotiation

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words to Hye Hyon Kim via hkim113@ilstu.edu by April 25, 2025.