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Call for Papers: "Trans/Positions:

Transnational,Transgender,Transdisciplinary,Transcultural

/ A conference on Feminist Inquiry in Transit / April 7-9, 2005 /
Deadline

for Submissions: October 5, 2004

Accepted applicants will be notified by mid-November

Please send a detailed abstract or panel proposal (1-2 pages) to:

Ruth Salvaggio, Director

Women's Studies Program

Beering Hall of Liberal Arts and Education, Rm. 6164

Purdue University

100 N. University St.

West Lafayette, IN 47907-2098





Transit: from the Latin transire, to go across, as in passage from one

subject to another. Responding to recent shifts in feminist inquiry,
this

conference seeks to bring together feminist scholars in the humanities,

social sciences, and sciences to think through the development of
"trans"

studies and "trans" methodologies. We invite proposals that explore the

turn from interdisciplinary and multicultural projects to transnational,

transgendered, transdisciplinary, and transcultural feminist projects.
We

welcome proposals for papers and panels, as well as performance pieces,

poetry, and fiction.

We offer the following questions to help generate varied, specific

submissions:

How has the concept of "trans"--and its attending emphases on processes
of

crossing, changing, becoming--shifted attention in feminist studies from

matters of difference and deferral to those of movement and mutation?

What might be the effects of this shift on questions of power and
agency,

categorical imperatives and emerging networks, and reconceptualizations
of

the workings of language, representation, performance, culture,
politics?

How can we reexamine the relation of Area Studies, Ethnic Studies, and

Postcolonial Studies to various fields in Anglo-European studies and

thought? What analyses of race, sexuality, gender, class and other

identity markers do or do not translate easily or innocently across

historical periods, genres, or national contexts?

In terms of "trans" methodologies, how do we see academic disciplines

interrogating themselves or resisting self-interrogating? What does

feminist transdisciplinarity risk, and what does it have to gain, by

becoming professionalized within the academy? Do projects that
transgress

discipline, for example women's autobiography or matters of law and

policy, enable us to bridge epistemological gaps? How does the shift to

"trans" methodologies enable us to rethink the body? nature?

materiality? reimagine space and place in globalization theory and in

local settings? reimagine the global and the local themselves?

How do trans/positions enable us to resist certain forms of impositions?

For example, how has transnational thought enabled queer theory to
reflect

upon the colonizing potential of coming-out narratives? Which

formulations of queer critique and theories of racialization are
specific

to US contexts and which are relevant to other national or transnational

contexts? How have activist communities, for example the

anti-globalization movement, contributed to the formation and
development

of transmovements?

How has the call to think across cultural, national, and gendered

boundaries become more politically urgent, but also more difficult in an

atmosphere of backlash, after 9-11?

Given the potential for cooptation by market imperatives of
globalization

and seemingly transparent calls for global unity, how might the trans

movement be understood as enabling yet troubling, promising yet ominous?


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