Women, Immigration/Transmigration and Public Policy

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
____________________________

WOMEN, IMMIGRATION, TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATION AND PUBLIC POLICY
MAY 17-18
HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA
Canada

SPONSORED BY THE NANCY’S CHAIR IN WOMEN’S STUDIES FOR THE MARITIMES AND THE FEMINIST PUBLIC POLICY PROJECT

We invite submission of abstracts for presentations addressing the topic Women, Immigration, Transnational Migration and Public Policy. Presentations may include discussion of social science, legal, etc data, discussion of cultural representations, policy recommendations, etc. Weare especially interested in the interconnection between immigration/transnational migration and globalization, and the feminization of poverty within the global political economy.

Topics may include but are not limited to:
So called “mail-order” bride marriages
Domestic workers
Transnational marriages
Spouse-dependent immigration status
International issues of domestic violence

Please send 500 word abstracts by January 15th to:Lenore Kuo, Nancy’s Chair in Women’s Studies, Mt. St. Vincent University Halifax, Nova Scotia B3M2J6 CANADA
lenore.kuo@msvu.ca

The conference will be held at Mt. St. Vincent University, a small, traditionally female, public institution, overlooking picturesque Bedford Basin.

Private rooms in 4 person suites will be available for $32.25/night(Canadian) including taxes, continental breakfast, parking and sportscenter pass for conference attendees.

Article: Female Images in Modern China(JWH)

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Article in
_JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY_
Volume 17, Number 4, 2005
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Title:
Pang, Laikwan.
"Photography, Performance, and the Making of Female Images in Modern China"
Subjects:
Photography of women -- China -- History.
Women -- China -- Identity -- History.
Performing arts -- China -- History.
Abstract:
Carefully examining the photographs of courtesans, Cixi the Empress, and dan
(the male opera performers impersonating female characters) within their
cultural economy in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century China, this
article explores the relations between photography as a newly imported leisure
activity and the making of female images within the new order of China's modern
society. Photography's direct replication of reality and its infinite
reproductive capacity characterize the complex relationship between reality and
representation in modern society, and also render a new cultural space for
identity performance. Examining a rich array of issues including prostitution,
cross-dressing, fashion, female deification, and the dynamics between gender
ideology and female agency, this article analyzes the instability of gender
meanings in photographs of women. A coherent pattern of "seeing," or a coherent
modern China, is still in the making.

Two recent articles on Chinese women

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Two recent articles in
Gender Issues 22. 1 (2005): 57-88
The Journal of Georgia Association of Historians, XXIV (2003): 80-105
Please check the journals for full texts
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Article (1):
"Women Journalists in the Chinese Enlightenment" Gender Issues 22, 1
(2005): 57-88.

By Yuxin Ma (Armstrong Atlantic State University)
Abstract (1):
May Fourth women journalists appropriated the discourse of women's
emancipation advocated by New Culturalists to shape their discussions of
women's suffrage, labor movement and legal rights. The rhetoric of
emancipation enabled women writers to redefine gender norms and
legitimized women's presence in coeducational schools, modern professions,
and public spaces. The interplay between discourse and practices
associated with new women enabled women activists to embrace the subject
positions opened by the ideal of the "new woman" and to appropriate the
rhetoric of human rights to advocate the sharing of male power and
privilege, while seriously exploring how to be women in the political and
social landscape of an emerging modern China.

Article (2):
"Constructing Manchukuo Womanhood to Serve the Japanese Empire" The
Journal of Georgia Association of Historians (Vol. XXIV, 2003): 80-105.
By Yuxin Ma (Armstrong Atlantic State University)
Abstract (2):
Reflective in Japanese gender policy in Manchukuo and North China such as
promoting "good wives and wise mothers" for Chinese women in Manchukuo
schools, mobilizing Chinese women to participate in the Movement of
Reinforcing Security in rural areas in North China, and staging Man’ei
actresses in Japan as examples of Pan-Asian femininity clearly demonstrate
the importance assigned to constructing a new imperial womanhood in the
Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. The goal was to depoliticize and
domesticate Chinese women, coach them to participate in Japanese
imperialist projects, sever their cultural ties with the rest of China,
and cultivate their love and loyalty to Japan. The ambivalence
communicated by the Man’ei actresses reveals that the Japanese ideological
invasion of the Asian mainland inspired collaboration and resistance
alike.

Women as Global Leaders 2006

Women as Global Leaders 2006: Communities in Transition
March 12-14, 2006
Zayed University
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
www.zuglobaleaders.org _________________________________________________________

Call for Papers
Community forms the basis of social, economic, political, and religious
life and it is within communities that we have our most intimate access
to and investment in leadership. Often people speak of community as
something deeply traditional, evoking ideas of close social relations,
entrenched values, and continuity over time. Increasingly, though, as
communities across the globe experience significant changes in both
population and scope, community is perceived through a uniquely modern
lens. Women joining the workforce, people moving for employment or
education, poverty rates increasing, global capitalism expanding, and
access to healthcare and disease changing all result in communities
experiencing deep and significant changes that affect all members.
Moreover, many problems or conditions are no longer perceived as
specifically global or local as communities across the globe face
similar challenges in health, education, social roles, the environment,
and leadership—but with different concerns.
Whether leaders operate on the grassroots level or in formal positions,
they must not only manage these changes but also direct them as change
agents, envisioning what the future should look like for their
constituencies. Women actively take both informal and formal roles
within their communities, leading from all levels and not simply from
home or positions of authority. Moreover, women find themselves at the
center of conversations about transition as changing gender roles
emerge as the focal point, catalyst, and consequence of change. For
women leaders, communities going through transition significantly
influence all levels of daily life.
Several conference subthemes have been identified, and submissions are
encouraged to address any theme; submissions across themes are also
welcome.

Subthemes
For a full description of each subtheme, see the conference Web site at
www.zuglobaleaders.org.

1. Service Learning and Volunteerism: Educating Tomorrow’s Leaders?
2. Community Organizations and Networks: Women’s Leadership, Roles, and
Expectations
3. Partnering for Change: Social Capital and Leadership
4. Community Transformations: Societal Change and Leadership
5. Leaders as Change Agents: Local Action for Global Problems
6. Leading the Future: Vision, Imagination, and New Forms of Community
in the Modern World
7. Women in Public and Private Spaces: Building and Sustaining Community
Conference presentations may be in the form of an academic paper, panel
discussion, poster session or workshop.

The conference format will include presentations by prominent world
leaders and personalities, and opportunities for participants to
interact with these leaders, as well as papers, presentations and
workshops. While student participation is limited to female students,
leadership practitioners and educators of both genders are invited.
Parallel and interactive sessions are planned for all participants, and
all sessions will be in English.

Deadline for Program Submissions: January 1, 2006
Submit proposals online at www.zuglobaleaders.org.

Contact Information

Stephen Brannon
Supervisor of Publications

Elizabeth Faier
Director of Leadership Education

Zayed University
P.O. Box 19282
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
e-mail: wagl2006@zu.ac.ae
phone: 971-4-264-8899

Intersecting Gender and Disability

CALL FOR PAPERS

"Intersecting Gender and Disability Perspectives in Rethinking
Postcolonial Identities"
Special issue of Wagadu, Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender
Studies. http://web.cortland.edu/wagadu/
______________________________________

This special issue of Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's and
Gender Studies focuses on the intersections of gender and disability
centered discourses, experiences and theories in rethinking postcolonial
identities. In recent Postcolonial theories and identity analysis, the
Postcolonial subjects have been studied for their multiple subject
positions vis-à-vis race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, but
rarely have these identity constructions been explored in terms of
disability experiences, theories and discourses. While medical and legal
discourses of disability pervade in postcolonial contexts, relatively few
studies have explored humanistic perspectives and dimensions of disability
in constituting, reassembling or deploying narratives and theories
regarding postcolonial identities. The special issue will undertake the
challenge to fill this gap as well as map new directions in theorizing and
analyzing intersecting discourses on gender, disability, and
postcoloniality in interdisciplinary contexts. This issue will include
articles that are informed by disability centered analysis of Postcolonial
identities, and intersections with a network of fields emerging from
Culture Studies, such as critical race feminist theory, transnational
feminism, visual and performative media, gender analysis, as well as film,
environmental and global studies. In addition, articles exploring
disability as a cultural construct and human rights discourse in relation
to Postcolonial contexts, issues and theories are welcome. Some of the
topics of investigation may deal with:

• Challenges to Postcolonial theorizing from intersecting gender and
  disability discourses.
• Impact of Postcolonial theories on analysis and representations of
  disability/gender issues, subjects, experiences and rights.
• Postcolonial Feminist disability theory.
• Analysis of social movements focusing on intersecting struggles for gender
  and disability rights in specific Postcolonial contexts.
• Representations of disability and bodies of difference in specific
  Postcolonial cultures and cultural productions.
• Critique of body and transbody phenomena and experiences as represented in
  futuristic literature and film, such as mechanical body snatchers, aliens,
  cyborgs and posthumans.
• Constructions of disability as represented or examined in Postcolonial
  theory, literature, film and/or art work.
• Challenges to identity norms in changing cultural landscapes and competing
  cultural influences.
• Exploring norms of sexuality, physical appearance, mental ability and
  social conformity in internet Arranged Marriages and Matrimonial web sites
  and their implications for subjects of disability.
• Theorizing Postcoloniality from Disability and GBLT subject positions.
• Emerging influence of popular western cultural ethos of physical fitness,
  beauty and body modification.
• Impact of Postcolonial/global phenomena such as war, environmental trauma,
  poverty and terrorism in rethinking ability/disability categories.
• Humanistic discourses of diseases (HIV-AIDS, Cancer, Polio, etc) and
  Postcolonial reframing of disability.
• Gendering disability and disabling gender.
• Corpulescence: studies of fatness as socially disabling image construction
  across cultures.
• "Starving Children": Charity and Media exhibitionism of "Third world"
  subjects of poverty.
• Transformative directions in specific disability rights activist movements
  worldwide and their specific links to other human rights activism.
• Disability centered reconsideration of values such as independence and
  self-reliance, especially as used in feminist discourses, towards concepts
  of interdependence and intersubjectivity.
• Disability and gendered perspectives in theorizing Postcolonial space,
  especially dealing with issues of accessibility.
• Disability culture as local and global phenomena.
• Migration and diasporic narratives of Postcolonial subjects of disability.
  

Please send Abstracts (75 words) in English by Jan 1, 2006, and complete
essays (approximately 5,500-7,500 words) by March 1, 2006. Essays in other
languages will also be considered. Submissions should be sent
electronically in MLA or APA format to: pparekh@spelman.edu

Dr. Pushpa Parekh
Professor of English
Director, Honors Program
Spelman College
Atlanta, GA 30314-4399
404-270-5665

Local, Global, and Glocal: Shifting Borders and Hybrid Identities

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY:
Local, Global, and Glocal: Shifting Borders and Hybrid Identities
University of Arizona
April 6-9, 2006
_____________________________

CALL FOR PAPERS:

The 2006 New Directions in Critical Theory Conference, an interdisciplinary
graduate student forum at the University of Arizona, will focus on tensions
between local identities within global contexts. This conference will address
the crisis of how 'local' identities must act in 'global' frameworks, and the ways that global frameworks in turn reflect and shape conceptions of local identities. Concepts of local identity such as 'nation,' 'culture', and 'language' are complicated by geo-political issues such as globalism and global capitalism. Individuals do not adhere to discrete categories of one culture, one nation, or one ideological framework. While subjects may still be defined by a local or global identity, they are also now subject to one that is 'glocal'--a hybrid identity that speaks to a complex
interconnectedness of both global and local identities. This is a particular concern in border states and towns that must negotiate the immediate local needs of a diverse community of Caucasian Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Mexicans, as well as the formation of a national identity that works to define and thereby exclude for economical and political reasons.

Glocal identity does not go unchallenged; groups fight for local identities and effectively tribalize knowledge and access to knowledge while the pressure to act within larger contexts constantly weighs on people. This tension can be found not only in the aforementioned identity and world
politics, but also in the academy itself, where academic tribalism comes into conflict with more global interactions within the university (crossing disciplinary boundaries in favor of interdisciplinarity). This leaves us to question how identity, discipline, and politics can be defined as both local and global, and how these relate to a hybrid glocal approach. An address by Lauren Berlant: Lauren Berlant, Professor of English at The University of Chicago will open this event. Professor Berlant, is a distinguished scholar who explores questions of nationhood, citizenship and gender. Her work complicates these issues by relating concepts of citizenship to class mobility, national and ethnic patriotism, constructions of family, consumerism, gender, and sexuality. In her scholarship and publications Professor Berlant exposes the multiple intersections between these facets of citizenship that shape how American culture perceives and constructs boundaries and borders, both physical and symbolic. Her recent publications include, Author of the National Fantasy, The Queen of American Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, and The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture.

We invite graduate students from any discipline to present theoretically-oriented scholarship that investigates the social formation and maintenance of local/tribal identities, global contexts, and the possibility of hybrid glocal identities, and in doing so, question the tensions between these forms of interaction and possible rewards attained from not merely crossing the border, but from redefining and reconceptualizing definitions of citizenship and nationhood. We would also welcome interdisciplinary work that crosses disciplinary borders to create new knowledge within a glocal university context (such as papers, film, artwork, installation projects, and so on).

Possible Topics:
Global/Local Politics
Postcolonialism
Language and discrimination
Language and racism
Language policy and planning
Tourism/Travel Writing/Advertising
Architecture/Geography
History/Autobiography
Memory and Identity
National/Cultural/Racial/Sexual/Gendered/Class Identity
Hybridity and Identity
Hybridity and Embodiment
Borders of the Human
Peripheral Zones/Contact Zones
The Rhetoric of Borders, Territories, Frontiers
Barriers/Communities/Home
Space/Mobility/Displacement
Immigration/Alienation
Othering
Borders and Criminality
Borders in Film and Literature
Science and Technology Studies
Virtual Borders
Borders and Boundaries in Cyberspace
Popular Culture/High Culture
Consumerism, Media and Identity
Sex and Economy
Violence and Desire
Heterinormativity/Homosexuality/Transsexuality
Feminist Theory and Queer Theory
Critical Race Theory
Spirituality and Subjectivity
Texts, Bodies and Spectacle
Bodies of/and Knowledge
Diversity, Similarity and the Academy
Translation/Appropriation/Adaptation
Teaching and Service Learning
The Academy and Activism

Please submit 100-250 word individual abstracts or panel proposals, comprised of a 100-250 word abstract for the entire panel and one 100-250 abstract for each paper. Include names, email address, mailing addresses, institutional affiliations, technology requests, paper titles, and abstracts by February 1st 2006 to:

Meg Smith Hallak (Department of English) or Erica Reynolds Clayton
(Department of English)
Modern Languages Building, Room 445
University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona 85721
(520) 621-1836
ndconf@email.arizona.edu
If you should have any questions or concerns, please contact Meg Smith
Hallak at ndconf@email.arizona.edu .

Translation into Chinese: Susan Mann's Book

Susan Mann's award-winning book, Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century, has been translated into Chinese by scholars in both Taiwan and the Chinese mainland. Please check, for example, website (www.sinobooks.com.tw ) for details.

Language, Mysticism, and Iconography: Exploring the Cultural Interface Between East and South Asia

American Comparative Literature Association Conference 2006
(Princeton University, March 23-26)

Seminar-panel
Language, Mysticism, and Iconography: Exploring the Cultural Interface
Between East and South Asia

Seminar Organizer(s) and Chairs: Helen Asquine Fazio, and V.G. Julie Rajan,
Rutgers University

Centuries of territorial conflict, shared tradition, and economic exchange
between the nations of East and South Asia have produced a wide-range of
hybrid cultural expressions influenced by the identity politics of both
regions. The evolution of Tibetan representations of the Indian-born Buddha
over the centuries, for example, displays Tibet's ongoing attempts to
integrate South Asian tradition into the hegemonic Chinese culture
dominating its territory. A plethora of travel writings, for example by
eighteenth-century British writers George Bogle and Samuel Turner and
modern-day Indian writer Vikram Seth, illustrate the various cultural
lenses, colonial, Western and postcolonial, non-Western, that have
speculated on the interpolation of East and South Asian cultures.
This panel explores how the social, political, economic, and religious
interactions between East and South Asia have influenced and produced a
wide-range of subjectivities framed by those regions, as expressed through
literary and cultural productions from the ancient through modern times.
Paper topics may address themes pertaining, but not limited, to: Reading and
Representing the "Subject"; Literature and Human Rights; Language and the
Human; Translation and Metamorphosis; Western Readings of Orientalism and
Otherness; Media and the Human; The Human and the Natural World; Philosophy,
Literature, and the Human; Gender and Transformation; Religion and
Globalism; Terrorism and Tradition; Monsters and Angels; and Temporal and
Spatial Expressions of Identity.

Paper proposal (maximum 250 words) and a brief bio should be submitted by
November 30, 2005, through the ACLA web-site:
http://webscript.princeton.edu/~acla06/site/?page_id=4
Inquiries may be directed to V.G. Julie Rajan, julie@rajans.org

'Ghosts, Gender, History'

Paper proposals are invited for the following seminar at the 2006
American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference in
Princeton, NJ:

"Ghosts, Gender, History"

Seminar Organizer: Sladja Blazan, Humboldt University (Berlin)

In most cultures the figure of the ghost stands for a forceful
separation of past and present. Some cultures integrate the ghost
figure into the present in order to provide a sense of continuity. In
literature and film the ghost motif has been directly associated with
particular cultural meanings, but has also been used as a plot element
free of the confines of realism. The meaning of the ghost is deferred
(Derrida). This quality of the ghost, neither dead nor alive, neither
present nor absent, provided a forum for addressing feminist issues.
Some of the first ghost stories were written by women. Charlotte
Perkins Gilman's classic The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) was only the
best-known of an enormous body of fiction of its type. Many examples
address ethnic/race issues. This seminar examines and asseses the
various versions of the ghost motif in literature as an opportunity to
articulate identity questions, cultural fears, and minority issues. We
will focus on ghostly ambitions written by women writers. The figure of
the ghost crosses boundaries of language, nationality, culture, class,
rase/ethnicity, gender and sexuality. At the same time it is the Other
within who speaks for all of them. How has this oppositional quality
been used and by whom? Papers on classic incarnations of ghost
literature as well as more recent sightings in fiction are welcome.

Abstracts should be 250 words, and submitted online at:
http://aslamp01.princeton.edu/~oitdas/acla06/

The American Comparative Literature Association annual conference is
organized primarily into seminars (or "streams"), which consist either
of twelve papers, if they meet on all three days of the conference, or
eight to nine papers, if they meet on two days. Papers should be 15-20
minutes long-no longer-to allow time for discussion. For further
information about the conference, including the format, please see:
http://webscript.princeton.edu/~acla06/site/