Notice

All new updates regarding the conference will be updated on this Facebook event link:

https://fb.me/e/swkJPlB1?mibextid=N4tvPT

Event Description:

Mapping gendered spaces in language, literature and culture

The Department of English, University of Dhaka, invites proposals on “Mapping Gendered Spaces in Language, Literature and Culture” on May 4-5, 2023. The conference will bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines, who will call into question, encourage discussions on and help shape discourses centering around the conventional stereotypes of patriarchy.

The conference will examine, for instance, woman’s hairdo as metonymic sites, as evident in the fictional spaces ranging from classical epics such as The Mahabharata, The Shahnameh, Samson Agonistes, and The Rape of the Lock to popular culture, such as in Disney animations, e.g. Mulan, Rapunzel.

This subversive act of cutting off a woman's hair serves as one metaphoric instance of historical specificities of colonization not only of the physical or the material but also of the gendered body. These specificities reveal significant nuances in the way gender operates to protest or protect from different disciplinary effects as well as to negotiate with different types of uncertainties and to inculcate a desire to end violence.

By extension, such issues are pertinent to all forms of thought, cultural expressions and lived experiences under asymmetrical power arrangements. Therefore, the conference will also investigate the role of language in communicating, archiving, or shaping agendas and ideologies pertinent to gender and colonization.

The conference will provide opportunities for graduates, undergraduates, doctoral students and academics from different disciplines to explore women’s lives, life and freedom.

The papers that have been selected to be showcased at the conference fall under the categories of:

● Alteration of the human body for religious, aesthetic, or social reasons.

● Body modification and mutilation

● Decolonialism and decolonial epistemologies

● The legacy of colonialization

● Language and questions of identity

● Gender abolition and feminist futures

● The politics and pitfalls of “inclusion” and/or “representation”

● Media and representation of resistance

● Women, queers, and trans radicals

● Theorizations of gender, struggle, and liberation

● Feminism and the ongoing context of settler colonialism

● Gender struggle, illegality, and anarchism

● Discussions of the body, sexuality, and/or desire within anarchism

● Gender, militancy, and street politics

● Intersections and exchanges between Indigenous, and Women of Colour feminisms

● Everyday practices of feminism and their influence/importance within cultures of resistance

● Transitional female being Women in myth and folklore

● Ecopolitics and gender

● Gender and language education

● Language, gender, sexuality and power

● Gendered identity and language learning

● Gender representation in EFL materials

● Heteronormativity in ELT

● Language, gender equality and social change

● Sexism in language

Paper presenters, poster presenters, attendees and students must register through this link:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSczVEdmTH_7Ohd1YQhAzzQDkPYS28SIWoaYDyYHH42VeCGwWA/viewform
 

All details must be filled up correctly for the registration to be finalized.

Sincerely,

Professor Zerin Alam

Chairperson

Department of English

University of Dhaka

& 

Professor Shamsad Mortuza

Convenor

Conference Committee

Department of English

University of Dhaka