CFP: The Female Transatlantic (9/15/06; SEA, 6/7/07-6/10/07)

Society of Early Americanists and Omohundro Institute of Early American
History and Culture(SEA & OIEAHC) Conference 2007
Williamsburg, Virginia June 7-10, 2007

I am seeking one more paper for the following panel:

The Female Transatlantic

Transatlantic studies have opened up rich perspectives on cultural,
economic, and political arrangements during the ages of discovery and
expansion. Indeed, they show us that such arrangements were never quite
fixed or closed. The vocabulary of mobility, transformation, exchange, and
creolization also suggests the possibility of altering and manipulating
categories of personal identity. But is this intimation of freedom a concept
that applies equally to all subjects of transatlantic study? If one bore the
identity "woman" and wore the badges of femininity, how did the processes of
exchange and mobility affect those categories? Indeed, during this period of
geopolitical transformation, the category of gender and, in particular, the
fixity and necessity of the concept of the virtuous woman could provide
psychological and cultural consolation. And, as the many tales of seduction
and abduction during the period attest, mobility and exchange were
experienced not simply as possibilities but also as threats. In this panel,
I would like to propose a specific discussion of the female
transatlantic--both the transatlantic female person and the transatlantic
world viewed through the lense of gender studies. How did women of the
transatlantic world negotiate or experience gender? Was their understanding
of "transatlantic exchange" substantively or imaginatively different from
men's? Did living in that particular world alter their pre-existing
experience of gender distinctions or hierarchies? What might the study of
transatlanticism teach us about gender that we would otherwise overlook? And
what, finally, does gender study teach us about the rhetoric of
transatlanticism?

Please direct your proposal and a short c.v. to Stacy Hinthorn Van Beek,
hinthorn_at_uci.edu (Department of English, University of California, Irvine)

For more information on the SEA and the conference, visit the SEA webpage at
http://www.mnstate.edu/sea/

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Received on Mon Sep 04 2006 - 18:54:03 EDT