Our future(s) Genre: upheavals, utopias, impatience.
THE CONGRESS
The Gender Institute organizes from July 4 to 7, 2023 its 3rd International Congress on Gender Studies, in partnership with the University Toulouse Jean Jaurès. This high point is an opportunity to bring together researchers from around the world to propose a moment of reflection on the place and form of the future and its gendered dimension in our societies, present and past, Western and non-Western.
A call for papers is open until 30 September 2022
CALL FOR PAPERS: THEMATIC
Future No(s). Genre: upheavals, utopias, impatience.
It is not the role of the humanities and social sciences to be optimistic or pessimistic. Nevertheless, since our debates on » gender and emancipation » at the congress in Angers in August 2019 in the context of the #metoo movement and the many feminist and LGBTQI + mobilizations, the context has become heavier. A long pandemic has upset our relationship with death, intimacy, space and others. Environmental and climate changes threaten many populations with almost no attention from governments. Democracies are under attack from all sides and on all continents. The war, already present in many places of the world, is now on the European continent. Our relationship with time is being changed, as well as the expectations, hopes and concerns that can or should be attached to it.
In this moment of multiple interrogations and mobilizations in which gender studies is a stakeholder, we would like to propose a moment of reflection on the place and form of future(s) and their gendered dimension in our societies, present and past, western and non-western. It is not only a question of considering the future as a scientific and technical projection, shaped in particular by social networks, but also of leaving all their place to the rearrangements of the ordinary social practices, imaginary, fears, hopes and impatiences which inhabit and modify time. And it is also important to account for the violence and power relations that the current or required upheavals are confronting.
The futures can be those of today for tomorrow but also the » futures of the past « . Thus, utopias as well as dystopias translate doubts or convictions about a gendered future From a Cité des Dames rid of male violence as early as 1405 by Christine de Pisan to the absolute patriarchal domination suffered by Margaret Atwood’s scarlet maids or Donna Haraway’s cyborg figure that inspires some contemporary feminisms.
Futures are also places of experience and awareness of what is changing, which generate as much regret for a golden age as a desire for a clean slate. Whether they are constituted as a unified horizon, as competing or successive futures, whether they are fraught with promise or threat, futures give rise to demands, impatience, and claims.
Futures also haunt our practices as researchers, our ways of thinking about gender. How do we need to project ourselves into the future, to do scientific work ? What does each of our disciplines make of the prognosis, the prediction, the social change or more simply the horizon of expectation of each of the researchers working on gender? What is the future, or the relationship to futures for our disciplines ? What future(s) do the current mobilizations open up? What new political issues are emerging today ?
It is these futures, thought-reflected from all our disciplines, that we want to apprehend on the occasion of this Congress. They can be approached in particular, but not exclusively, from the problematization axes listed below.
Open to all, young or experienced researchers, this conference will combine plenary sessions and workshops. Proposals may take the form of individual papers or workshops coordinated by one or two leaders.