Gender and Empire. Exploring Comparative Perspectives and Intersectional Approaches

Gender and Empire. Exploring Comparative Perspectives and Intersectional Approaches

Organizer
Prof. Dr. Ulrike Lindner, Dr. des Dörte Lerp (University of Cologne); in cooperation with Competence Area IV: Cultures and Societies in Transition, Global South Studies Center, Faculty of Philosophy; Morphomata International Center for Advanced Studies
Venue
Morphomata International Center for Advanced Studies, Weyertal 59 (rear building), 50937 Köln
Location
Cologne
Country
Germany
From - Until
23.09.2015 - 26.09.2015
Deadline
13.08.2015
By
Dörte Lerp

Scholars have been exploring the history of women, gender and empire for more than three decades. Starting off by questioning the notion of colonialism as an exclusively male endeavor, they did not just add the stories of white and colonized women to the historiography on empire. They explored the effects of colonization on indigenous and migrant women and stressed the centrality of western women to the imperial project, but went on to expose colonialism itself as a fundamentally gendered project. However, despite the large body of literature that has been produced over years the history of gender and empire is far from told. On the contrary, the amount of scholarship has only served to reveal the complexity of colonial gender practices, relations and ideologies. Focusing on how gender intersected with other social categories such as race, class, religion and sexuality the conference will reexamine the interconnected histories of gender and empire. At the same time we strive for a comparative perspective of the subject in order to address similarities and differences between various colonial and imperial settings.

Our main objectives are
1. to systematically combine gender, colonial and new imperial history and thereby develop new global perspectives on political, social, and cultural processes within empires,
2. to apply intersectional approaches to specific historical case studies in order to redefine the complex relationship between gender and empire, and
3. to compare maritime and continental empires.

The papers deal with key issues of colonial and gender history such as intimacy, sexuality, war, labor or education. They focus on various imperial formations from “typical” colonies in Africa or Asia, to settler colonial settings and imperial peripheries within Europe or Asia.

The conference will be held in English. Participation is for free, but please register till August 13th, 2015 since we have only limited seats available at our venue.

Programm

Wednesday, 23 September 2015

16.30-18.30 Registration
18.30-19.00 Introduction: Ulrike Lindner / Dörte Lerp (Cologne)
19.00-20.00 Opening Lecture by Clare Midgley (Sheffield): Locating agency: Feminism, religion and empire after the transnational turn
20.00 Reception

Thursday, 24 September 2015

9.15-10.45
Panel 1: Biographies and Relationships
Bettina Brockmeyer (Bielefeld): Love affair? State’s affair? The interpretations of a hanging in German East Africa or questions of gender and race in colonial historiography
Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst (Cologne): Men and Women on the Edge of Time – When the colonial order falls apart
Chair: Larissa Förster (Cologne)

10.45-11.00 Coffee break

11.00-12.30
Panel 2: Regulating Marriages
Julia Malitska (Stockholm): Colonizing Marriage: Legal Restrictions on Marriage of the German colonists in the Black Sea Steppe in the first half of the 19th century
Alexis Rappas (Istanbul): Desperate Colonial Wives: Mixed Marriages and the Boundaries of Imperial Sovereignty in the Aegean Sea
Chair: Béatrice Hendrich (Cologne)

12.30-14.00 Lunch break

14.00-16.00
Panel 3: Masculinity, Femininity and Sexuality
Jan Severin (Berlin): Male Same-Sex Desire and Masculinity in Colonial German Southwest Africa
Stefan Hübner (Munich): Muscular Christianity and the Emergence of a “Modern Asia”: The YMCA, the YWCA, and the Far Eastern Championship Games (c. 1913-1934)
Ofri Ilani (Berlin): An Oriental Vice: Representations of Sodomy in Early Zionist Discourse
Chair: Oliver Tappe (Cologne)

16.00-16.30 Coffee break

16.30-18.00
Panel 4: Masculinity in Imperial Wars
Silvan Niedermeier (Erfurt): Imperial Self-Fashioning: Approaching Gender and Empire through the lens of private photo albums of the Philippine American War (1899-1902)
Sandra Maß (Bielefeld): Colonial Soldiers in the First World War: Masculinity, Race and Nationalism in Germany
Chair: Jens Ruppenthal (Cologne)

Friday, 25. September 2015

9.15-10.45
Panel 5: Civilising Missions and Imperial Feminism
Brigitte Fuchs (Vienna): Austria-Hungary's Civilising Mission in Bosnia and its Positive Effects on Domestic Feminists' Demands 1890-1918
Ivan Sablin/Valentina Smirnova (Heidelberg/St Petersburg): Gender, Orientalism, and Decolonization in North Asia: Female Toilers of the Orient in Bolshevik Discourse of the 1920s–1930s
Chair: Ulrike Lindner (Cologne)

10.45-11.00 Coffee break

11.00-12.30
Panel 6: Female Suffrage and Female Writing
Sumita Mukherjee (Oxford): The Global and Imperial Connections of Indian Campaigners for Female Suffrage in the Interwar Period
Kaitlin Staudt (Oxford): Generic Modernism: Popular Literature Modernity and Gender in Britain and Turkey
Chair: Jens Jäger (Cologne)

12.30-14.00 Lunch break

14.00-16.00
Panel 7: Education and Schooling
Jana Tschurenev (Göttingen): Between patriarchy, imperialism, and women’s empowerment: Women and education in colonial India (1820s-1880s)
Divya Kannan (New Delhi): 'Saving Our Sisters': Female education and the London Missionary Society in Nineteenth Century South India
Aude Chanson (Paris): European women: Model for Tanzanian women in the schooling process during the German colonial period (1885-1914)?
Chair: Barbara Lüthi (Cologne)

16.00-16.30 Coffee break

16.30-18.00
Panel 8: Development and Social Care in Colonial Settings
Angharad Fletcher (Hong Kong / London): Caring for Empire: Colonial Nursing in Hong Kong and Cape Town (1880-1914)
Charlotte Riley (York): To Educate a Girl is to Educate a Family: Gender and Early British Development Practice in the Interwar Period
Chair: Esther Helena Arens (Cologne)

19.00 Conference dinner

Saturday, 26. September 2015

9.30-11.30
Panel 9: Indigenous Servants and Colonial Homes
Violaine Tisseau (Paris): Taking care of European children in colonial Madagascar (1896-1960)
Eva Bischoff (Trier): Being at Home: Settler Colonial Biopower and the Intersections of Race, Class, and Gender in Colonial Australia
Elizabeth Dillenburg (Minneapolis): The “Pride of Race”: Domestic Service Debates in New Zealand and South Africa, c. 1890-1914
Chair: Ulrike Schaper (Berlin)

11.30-12.30 Final discussion
Chair: Ulrike Lindner / Dörte Lerp (Cologne)

Contact (announcement)

Dr. des Dörte Lerp / Alina Klein, B.A.

Universität zu Köln, Albertus Magnus Platz, 50923 Köln

dlerp@uni-koeln.de / aklein23@smail.uni-koeln.de

http://histinst.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/858.html
Editors Information
Published on
05.07.2015
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