Dear WSNers:
Appended below is a call for papers for a proposed panel at the
upcoming Beijing conference. If anyone is interested, or
has questions about the conference/panel, please feel free
to contact me. JL.
_________________________________________________________________________
CALL FOR PAPERS
For a Proposed Panel Sponsored by the Sociologists for Women in Society
(SWS) at the NGO Forum On Women, Beijing, China. August 30-September 8, 1995.
(DE)CONSTRUCTING "THIRD WORLD WOMEN":
POWER AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION IN CROSS CULTURAL RESEARCH
Recent feminist research and writings, influenced by the postmodernist turn
within social science disciplines and literary and cultural criticism,
have foregrounded the construction of the third world female subject as
essentialized "other"--victimized by society-wide development processes
such as those brought about by structural adjustment policies in the public
arena on the one hand, and by the micro politics of domestic violence,
cultural practices, and patriarchal control in the private arena on
the other hand. Fuelled by the gaining popularity of a self-reflexive
turn in methodology and an acknowledgement of the authorial power of
representation, this work makes important contributions to rethinking
the relationships between "researchers" and "researched", between those
occupying locations within the "North" and "South", and between "self"
and "other". Most critically, this research suggests the urgent necessity
for reworking social science discursive constructions of gender
in/and the third world to account for the full range of agency and
resistance, power and praxis, specificity and variation at local, regional,
and global levels that is all too often clustered together under the label
"third world woman".
This panel will offer a timely and highly visible forum for presenting
theoretical and methodological advancements that have been made in recent
years, indicating the degree to which various disciplines in the social
sciences have built upon the insights of contemporary social and feminist
theory. The purpose of the panel is to make visible theoretical and
methodological strategies which construct representations of "third world
women". These metatheoretical strategies are typically embedded at
implicit levels and hence rendered potentially invisible in social science
writing. It will also serve as an opportunity to present this research
cohesively, much of it previously dispersed across diverse areas of
sub-specialization such as development, ecology and the environment, work
and occupations, religion, social movements, culture, and sexuality. This
international event will thus ensure a global reception and showcasing of
heretofore overlooked pathbreaking advances in the area of gender research.
Furthermore, this panel will provide a platform for discussions on how
such paradigmatic (re)constructions might be further construed outside
academic debates--for policy and action at local levels.
Particularly welcome are research based papers that address these issues in
a wide variety of fields and a broad spectrum of countries and regions.
Papers should attempt to push the implications of methodological reworkings
for substantive discourse, and should thus address the question(s): How are
these methodological strategies deployed in substantive analysis? What are
the implications for the critical (RE)constructions of "gender" in the "third
world" within your substantive field? How does it problematize extant
constructions of theoretical categories such as those of "labor" or "class",
"ecology", "social movements", "sexuality", "identities" etc.? Furthermore,
how do these substantive issues intersect in deeply important ways--as
complexly and problematically interwoven aspects of women's lives? What
are the implications of these intersections for theorizing about "third
world women" -- all too often unidimensionally conceived as either "workers",
"mothers", or "sex objects"?
Contributors are further urged to address themselves to the broad audience
expected at the Beijing Conference; to actively seek to open up channels
of discussion around these issues between academics, activists, policy makers,
and practitioners.
Submission Note:
Persons interested in presenting papers at this panel should contact/submit
abstracts to the organizer at the address listed below as soon as possible
(preferably before 2/23/95). Please include your full institutional
affiliation along with contact information and an extended abstract
(450-500 words) that details how the paper will address the issues
outlined in the panel description. In addition to two (paper) copies
of the abstracts, please also include abstracts on file (as text files
or in Wordperfect) on 3.5" IBM diskettes.
Panel Organizer:
Jayati Lal
Department of Sociology
323 Uris Hall, Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
PHONE: (607) 657-2607
FAX: (607) 255-8473
EMAIL: JL34@cornell.edu
Jayati Lal
Department of Sociology
323 Uris Hall
Ithaca, New York 14853-7601
email: jl34@cornell.edu
Fax: (607) 255-8473