CALL. 15.06.2015: Gender, identity, and intersectionality in antiquity: models of oppression and pri

FECHA LÍMITE/DEADLINE/SCADENZA: 15/06/2015

FECHA CONGRESO/CONGRESS DATE/DATA CONGRESSO: 31/08-01/09/2015

LUGAR/LOCATION/LUOGO: University of Auckland (Auckland, New Zealand)

ORGANIZADOR/ORGANIZER/ORGANIZZATORE: Auckland chapter of Australasian Women in Ancient World Studies (AWAWS)

INFO: maxine.lewis@auckland.ac.nz

CALL:

Classics and Ancient History at The University of Auckland is pleased to invite abstracts for an interdisciplinary conference on gender and identity in the ancient world. We are seeking papers that focus on how gender intersected with aspects of identity including (but not limited to) ethnicity, class, and social status. We welcome submissions from researchers working on texts and/or material evidence from Egypt, the Near East, Greece, the Roman Empire, and the late antique world.

We invite speakers to situate their research on gender in antiquity within the framework of intersectionality, which is currently influential in the social sciences and in feminist writing outside the academy. The intersectional model holds that people with multiple marginalized identities experience discrimination based on the particular intersections of their identities. We seek to investigate how the evidence of antiquity might validate or complicate the intersectional model.

We are particularly interested in papers that examine evidence of gender and identity in antiquity with a view to big picture questions, such as:

• Is there evidence of intersectionality in antiquity?

• If so, how did intersectionality in antiquity manifest?

• If not, what might that signify for the current model of intersectionality in other disciplines, feminisms, and the LGBTQI world?

• How might the nature of our sources (fragmentary, often derived from the elite) affect our attempts to apply the intersectional model to antiquity?

• Since intersectionality is a model that responds to modern concepts of race (and thus racism) and modern sexual orientation (and thus homophobia), how might it be problematic (or conversely productive) to apply this model to antiquity?

This conference is organized in conjunction with the Auckland chapter of Australasian Women in Ancient World Studies (AWAWS), an organization that aims to foster gender equality in our fields (https://socawaws.wordpress.com/ ). Our objective in organizing the conference is to further this aim, and to engage people who have an active or nascent interest in ancient identity with modern political issues and the theoretical models currently being used to describe them.