The aim of the Global Turns and Gender Returns Program is to promote new transcultural intellectual alliances and dialogical conversations among gender scholars based in manifold locations throughout the world. Through organizing international conferences and working groups in diverse global sites, it aims to facilitate curricular collaboration and transformation in gender studies and gender history, and foster intellectual debate about how the words "gender" and "global" — and their proxies and translations — may find new uses and meanings in academic and activist practice in the twenty-first century.
The Program will enable thinking about gender on a global scale while reorienting the study of gender in a comparative and expansive way. Some of the questions that will be addressed are: How is gender being deployed in various contexts in diverse parts of the world? To what extent has the development of "gender studies" in the "South" and "East" been associated with new forms of Western hegemony? The Program was launched with a roundtable on global turns in gender studies in Winter 2003. It brought together a set of feminist speakers who opened the debate with strikingly different reports on the history and status of gender studies, women's studies, and feminisms in China (Wang Zheng, a UM historian, based in IRWG and Women's Studies), India (Urvashi Butalia, founder and director of the feminist Kali Press in Delhi), South Africa (Patricia Hayes, a historian of gender, colonialism, and visual history from the University of Western Cape), and Sudan (Amal Fadlalla, a UM medical anthropologist, based in CAAS and Women's Studies).
The Program centers around a series of international workshops and public events on gender studies and history, while also exploring how to better link IRWG to gender studies institutes in other parts of the world. A principal activity of the Program will be to support the organization of two international conferences — in Cape Town, South Africa in August 2004 and one in Delhi, India in 2006. In addition, the Program will organize up to three small workshops or conferences in Ann Arbor in 2005 and 2006.
Conferences and Public EventsThe first conference was a workshop on "Visuality and Gender," held at the University of Western Cape in August 2004 and co-organized by Patricia Hayes and Nancy Hunt. The workshop considered how gender might be deployed to generate new understandings of the workings of visuality, with particular emphasis on how potential ‘Eurocentrisms’ in visual theory and practice may be unsettled from critical sites in "South." Importantly, the meeting raised questions about "agendas of visibility" and visual economies while opening up new pathways to gendered pasts. Funding from a Dutch foundation, SEPHIS, enabled scholars from other continents in the South to attend this workshop; and program funding enabled three UM faculty and three UM graduate students to attend. Some of the papers will be included in a special issue of Gender & History, entitled "Visual Genders."
During Winter 2004, with special additional funding from Rackham, the Program organized a Gender and History Workshop Series on Friday afternoons. Several prominent feminist scholars — including Kathleen Canning, Denise Riley, Ann Stoler, Tomi Tonumura, and Wang Zheng — were invited to rethink a previously published (and precirculated) work in relation to feminist debates and gender scholarship today. The audiences were diverse and large, and the debates spirited. This series helped establish a new intellectual community around gender history and its global transformations at UM.
During the 2004-05 academic year, in conjunction with the Institute for Historical Studies, the Program sponsored a new workshop series, "Gender in the Archive." Once again, meetings were held on Friday afternoons, and the discussions were based on precirculated papers. Invited speakers included Shawn Michelle Smith, Laura Engelstein, Natalie Zemon Davis, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Michele Mitchell, Sarah Schulman, and Valerie Traub.
Three small workshops or conferences are being organized in Ann Arbor during 2005 and 2006. Each has a small working group of graduate students and faculty who are developing the theme and idea for organization, speakers, and format. There was a workshop on gender history in Latin America in April 2005, and there will be one on Gender in the Islamic World and another on Postsocialist Genders during the 2005-06 academic year. We are using these workshops to invite to campus three to four gender historians based in the South or the East who might become members of the Gender & History editorial collective.
The final major Program event will be a conference in Delhi in 2006. The meeting will take stock of thirty years of gender studies scholarship and activism from multiple locations.
Working Groups and Curricular TransformationThe Program's activities began to take shape during Fall 2003 as a faculty working group was formed for the purposes of planning specific programs and envisioning off-shoots and allied projects in keeping with the major goals of the "Global Turns and Gender Returns" Program. These objectives include: (1) strengthening the intellectual community of UM faculty and graduate students doing work on gender history/studies from global, transnational, and comparative perspectives; (2) developing a strong graduate curriculum in gender and history, notably a syllabus on comparative gender historiographies that could be taught from multiple locations in the world; and (3) maintaining a tension between disciplinarity and inter-disciplinarity as we simultaneously explore the global turns and returns of gender history and gender studies.
A principal aspiration of the Program is the formation of a network of faculty at UM and allied gender and women's studies institutes internationally who are committed to developing cutting-edge curricula in gender studies from comparative, global, and transnational perspectives is a principal aspiration. With this in mind, the Program organized a week-long May 2004 seminar on how to strengthen the graduate curriculum in gender history at UM. Fifteen faculty from American Culture, History, Near Eastern Studies, and Women's Studies and several graduate students participated in this series of lively discussions about how best to develop a foundational curriculum in gender history, which will simultaneously decenter the West and decenter the modern. Special funding from LSA and Rackham enabled this seminar.
The May seminar enabled the establishment of a vibrant intellectual community of faculty and graduate students interested in gender history at UM, with strong links to gender institutes and scholars in Cape Town, Delhi, Minsk, and Strasbourg. Since Fall 2002, Gender & History has supported a graduate student reading group; this effort has been strengthened through the Program, which this year gave new energy to this group by asking them to help organize the Gender and History Workshop Series, attend one session of the May seminar, and plan the Gender in the Archive Series for 2004-05.
Internationalizing Gender & History
The Program grows out of the network of gender historians centered around Gender & History. Over the past few years, Gender & History, the leading journal in the field whose North American office is located in IRWG, has committed itself to push the limits of what is conventionally understood by gender history in both geographical and conceptual terms. For the journal, this commitment involves globalizing its editorial collective and seeking new authors and readerships across the world. Over the last three years, Gender & History has made a concerted effort to add editorial collective members who work on and are based in areas of the world that have been underrepresented in the journal's pages, notably Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. Through the activities of the Program, this trend will be continued so as to make the journal a genuinely global academic publication.
The Program's directors are Nancy Hunt (History) and Helmut Puff (German and History), Helmut Puff is also the co-editor of Gender & History. For more information, please contact either of them at nrhunt@umich.edu or puffh@umich.edu respectively.