Cher collègue,

Je vous envoie ci-dessous un appel à communications pour un colloque international, qui aura lieu à KU Leuven en décembre 2017. Pourriez-vous l’intégrer dans la liste « socius » ?

Merci d’avance,

Meilleures salutations,

Beatrijs Vanacker

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Cfp : The Gender of Sovereignty (Leuven, 18-20 December / deadline for abstracts : August 1st 2017)

http://thegenderofsovereignty.be/papers.html

To what extent would our perception of the history of sovereignty change if we systematically looked at it from a gender perspective? Sovereignty as political power or authority of governance has been a major theme in European thought from the beginning of the intellectual reflection on community. Indeed, a multiplicity of discourses and cultural practices ranging from philosophy and political theory to historiography, theology, arts and literature have, often in entangled ways, sought to legitimize, represent, explore, recalibrate or reject conceived notions of rule. While there can be no misunderstanding as to the reality of sovereignty, its conceptualization has always been a matter of imagination, as Hobbes already revealed when he conceded a reciprocity of ‘laws of nature’ and ‘persons artificial’ in his design of the appropriate rule. Yet whereas the imagination of sovereignty is not a straightforward narrative, its entire history reveals a remarkably obsessive embarrassment with gender that still persists today. No matter what political covenant became dominant, the idea of female sovereignty or women’s consistent participation in matters of authority was deemed abnormal, exceptional, unnatural, hence necessarily transitory and in need of a rhetoric of apology and endorsement. Not only state rule, but mutatis mutandis all forms of civic communal configurations, such as the field of cultural production, religious life or scholarship, seem to echo the same mantra of (un)gendered authority. And to what extent do biopolitical theories of rule and power include a gender perspective? Was political sovereignty by women not always already subject to some form of ‘biopolitical’ discourse? Does, in other words, history from the perspective of female rule yield a similar narrative from antiquity to modernity as set out by Foucault et al.? This international, interdisciplinary conference seeks to revisit the history of sovereignty in European thought and culture by consistently assuming a gender perspective from the beginnings of modernity until today.

The conference on the gender of sovereignty in European politics and aesthetics wants to bring together investigations that revisit issues of gender and sovereignty from a variety of disciplines. The historical scope of the conference ranges from the beginnings of modernity to the present. We invite papers that address imaginations of sovereignty in political and cultural discourse either through case-studies or in comprehensive analyses envisioning a modified history. Topics of interests include but are not restricted to:

• Women’s sovereignty in politics, the arts and different media and performances: cases, modifications and ambivalences
• Metonymies of sovereignty (in civic life and cultural networks)
• Fantasies of female rule in intellectual or poetical discourse
• Gender, authority and literary and artistic genres
• Beyond the public eye: experiences and reflections of power in correspondence, diaries and memoirs
• History and historiography: from historicism to biopolitics
• Pathological scripts of female rule
• Bodies of female rule

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Beatrijs Vanacker

Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen)

KU Leuven

French literature – Research Unit Literature, Discourse and Identity

Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 – box 3311

3000 Leuven