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CALL FOR PAPERS

SPECIAL ISSUE OF GENDER AND HISTORY

TITLE: VISUAL GENDERS


    What can a serious engagement with visuality bring to the study of
gender histories? Submissions are invited for a Special Issue of the
journal that will focus on visual genders. Aside from a body of feminist
scholarship in film and art history, research has treated gender studies
and visual studies largely in isolation from one another. Given Gender and
History's record of exploring new pathways into gendered pasts, this
attention to the visual provides the opportunity for a new and critical
historical turn.
In certain quarters, placing pictures at the center of historical inquiry
has
the effect of unsettling the gender asymmetries in the archive. The
implicit hierarchies of documentary text, oral source and photograph for
example are brought into question, because it is often the case that women
are seen but not heard. This belies the common assertion of their
'invisibility', and raises crucial issues about the agendas of visibility
of those who produced the images.
    Visual theorists and others have pointed to the western tendency to
privilege vision over the other human senses. Special Issue editors are
therefore interested in papers that interrogate the cultural primacy of the
visual, its potential Eurocentrisms and gender configurations in colonial
and other settings. Equally, what happens when the means of representation
come under the control of those who were formerly the object of the gaze?
Editors encourage submissions that study the making of new visual cultures
and economies ? with women or marginalised men central to the process..
The visual construction of femininities and masculinities; how visual
culture both reflects and produces ideologies of gender; the unearthing of
neglected artists, photographers, filmmakers: such themes are pertinent to
the Special Issue and the methodological challenges of attending to the
visual.
    Finally, editors encourage papers that explore the ways gender might be
deployed to generate new understandings of the workings of visuality. This
is in a context where surveillance and 'the gaze' are frequently
represented in visual theory as part of an almost unshakable formula of
perceptual mastery and control. This ignores the gendered and even
unconscious relation between observer and observed, subject and object,
knower and known. It calls for a repositioning of visual studies in
relation to gender: a new interdisciplinary cluster that will, it is hoped,
lead to fresh research and political insights.
    The Guest Editor for this Special Issue is Patricia Hayes (University
of the Western Cape). A parallel workshop on Gender and Visuality is
planned for 26-29 August 2004 in Cape Town (contact [log in to unmask])..
Please send abstracts only, by 31 July 2004, to Gender and History
([log in to unmask] or Gender and History, IRWG, 1136 Lane Hall, 204 S. State
Street, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1290, USA).