Dear Colleagues,
I am working to organize a theme ("Agency and Action") session for the 2009
Social
Science History Association meeting (Long Beach, CA, USA, 12-15 November)
on
the topic of feminine/femmenine passivity and agency. A brief description
of what
we have in mind is pasted below. Please respond to me if you would be
interested in submitting an abstract for such a session
(dominique.grisard@???).
More information about the Social Science History Association and this
year's meeting is available at
www.ssha.org. If you are a PhD student, you
are eligible to apply for travel assistance
from the SSHA.
Best,
Dominique
Female Passivity and Agency
Dominique Grisard, University of Basel, Organizer
In both liberal feminism and society at large, passivity is understood
to be a non-activity associated with the subservience of feminine women
and girls. In this view, passivity ultimately serves to reproduce gender
hierarchies. On the rare occasion that passivity is acknowledged to be
an activity, the focus tends to lie on passive aggressive women and
girls. This session seeks to complicate the concept of passivity by
looking at passivity as agency and action. Passivity is deployed by
female identified women and girls in all different kinds of settings and
for all different kinds of purposes. Hence, this session seeks scholars
working on passivity as a conscious or unconscious strategy of
resistance, compliance, protection, aggression etc. performed by
feminine women and girls.
