Gender, Generation and the Body:
21st Annual Conference of the West of
England and South Wales Women’s History Network

This conference will be held at Cardiff University on Saturday 21st June 2014. The conference will explore the relation of ideas and experiences of gender, generation and the body in a range of historical contexts. The keynote speaker is Dr. Garthine Walker (Cardiff University).

Potential topics for papers include:

– the interrelation of gender and age in historical representations and experiences of the body;
– the importance of different understandings and experiences of the gendered body in mediating inter-generational relationships, both within and beyond the family;
– the practical, emotional, and social dimensions of bodily care in past societies;
– the intersection of the biological and the social at differently gendered life stages (for example, ‘coming of age’ through menstruation or initiation into masculine adulthood through work);
– the role of subjective reassessments of gendered and bodily experience in life-writing through the ages.

We encourage participants to consider the relation of gender and the body to ‘generation’ in its many possible meanings: an expression of demographic fact; as shorthand for shared cultural characteristics (“the lost generation”); a description of age; and an act of origination, production, or procreation. We welcome the involvement of postgraduate researchers.

The West of England and South Wales Women’s History Network is able to offer a limited number of competitive bursaries to contribute towards attendance at the conference. For further details, see: http://humanities.uwe.ac.uk/swhisnet/grants-bursaries.html.
Abstracts of 200 words should be sent to Tracey Loughran (LoughranTL@cardiff.ac.uk) by April 18th 2014.