CFP: Suffragette Legacy: How Does the History of Feminism Inspire Current Thinking in Manchester?

Saturday 8 March 2014

Call for Papers

From The Village and David Bowie’s Suffragette City to Femen activists and Pussy Riot, the suffragette legacy is everywhere in modern culture.

As part of the Manchester Wonder Women events celebrating International Women’s Day 2014, this one-day conference seeks to bring together academics, artists, politicians and activists to present and speak about how their work is affected by the suffragette legacy of feminism.

Welcoming academic papers, feminist theory, dance, music or other, this one-day conference wishes to bring together different people to reflect on the important, but often complex, legacy of the suffragettes. Within an interdisciplinary context we wish to explore if, how and why the movement still matters in politics, academia, the arts and other aspects of modern Manchester.

Papers or submissions are welcome from any background, but special consideration will be given to anyone who directly engages with the Manchester history of the women’s movement.

Send your proposed paper, project or idea to the conference convenors by 15 October 2013 at 12pm. We will let you know if you have been successful by 1st November. If your work has a particularly visual or performance element, do send us lots of details about it. We are hoping to display related materials, objects and artworks, so any visual output is welcome in the planning stages.

Venue: People’s History Museum, Left Bank, Spinningfields, Manchester M3 3ER. For directions, please click here.

Fee: £25/£15 (concessions, students or unwaged - proof required); bursaries may be available in the Autumn

Twitter: @wonderwomenmcr

Websites: Wonder Women and blog

CFP: Literary Dolls: The Female Textual Body from the 19th Century to Now

8 March 2014
University of Durham

This one-day conference held on International Women’s Day 2014 assesses the ways in which women’s physical form has been depicted in artworks from the nineteenth century to the present day.

“Lucky I have nice hands if nothing else,” says Ella at last, very dry. He comes to her, picks up her hands, kisses them, wearily, rake-like: “Beautiful doll, beautiful.” Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

Through history women’s bodies have been the subject of artistic presentation, ostensibly to celebrate the beauty of the female form, but also to fetishize, to dismember and to control women both within the arts and in the wider world. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to appraise the depiction of women’s physical form in artworks, as well as how artistic presentation has informed other disciplines, from the Nineteenth Century to Now, in order to assess how far the arts have changed in line with apparent developments in the treatment of women, over the comparable historical gulf. We are also keen to consider the social impact the arts have had, and continue to have, on the treatment of women.

Keynote speakers at the conference will include Pulitzer Prize winning author, Jane Smiley; Professor Jo Phoenix (University of Durham); Dr Kate MacDonald (University of Ghent).

We welcome abstracts of three hundred words for twenty minute papers discussing any textual presentation of women’s bodies. This includes literary depictions, but also those in film, television, digital media, the visual arts and the applied social sciences. Topics may include, but are not limited to the following:

The romanticised female form
Femininity vs. Femaleness vs. Womanliness
The historicized figure
The broken form
Fetishized body parts
Females made inanimate, e.g. as dolls or statues
Media representations of femaleness
The social impact of textual bodily representation
The sexual figure
The body in motion
Woman as goddess or muse
The maternal female
Females ensnared in the text
Violence on the body
Queering the body
Females made inanimate, e.g. as dolls or statues
Media representations of femaleness
The social impact of textual bodily representation

The conference will run at Durham University on 8th March 2014, International Women’s Day. It is organised in association with the University of Durham’s Centre for Sex, Gender and Sexualities.

Please send abstracts to the conference convenors by 1st June 2013.

For more information, please see the conference website.