Call for Papers

Sex, Gender, Species

Deadline for Abstract Submissions: October 1, 2010

The growing field of animal studies has turned critical attention to the real conditions and stakes of human-animal relations. It has also become a new and important focus for debates over identity and difference that have embroiled academic theory over the past quarter century. Recent scholarship on animal otherness as well as discussions of how to traverse boundaries of difference often draws upon a history of feminist theory and practice even as this borrowing remains unacknowledged. The purpose of this conference is to foreground the relations between feminist and animal studies and to examine the real and theoretical problems that are central to both fields of inquiry.

Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:

• gendered ethics and the politics of animal rights discourse and activism
• queering the animal
• animals and “nature”/ animals in “culture”
• violence against women and violence against animals
• material feminism and companion species
• pet love and the boundaries of kin, kind, and sex
• technologies of seeing or the gaze of/on sex and species
• otherness, empathy, and animal care ethics
• the woman and the animal – pitfalls and strategies of essentialism.

We are soliciting abstracts for papers that can be presented in 30 minute time slots. Selected presenters will receive a $1000 honorarium to cover travel expenses.

Submission guidelines: Please email a 1-2 page (500 -750 word) abstract for your proposed paper to lgruen@wesleyan.edu and kweil@wesleyan.edu

Conference Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Public Life and the Ethics in Society Project

For more information, see http://sexgenderspecies.conference.wesleyan.edu/

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1. Campus Progress Snubs Animal Rights