2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This panel examines the dynamic interaction between identities, community, and claims to space across urban sites (Johannesburg, Mexico City, New York City, New Orleans, and Vancouver).  Each presenter examines trajectories of formation and disruption of/as different groups have become integrated or further marginalized within their cities.  The panelists take a contemporary historical approach by situating each paper within the political, social, economic and transnational histories of each location.  We read these histories of women’s, queer, and/or communities of low-income communities of color to consider shared and divergent insights that can be gained about identities, spatial politics, and the animating or resulting social justice questions.  We bring together readings ofsettler colonialism and queer geographies with motherwork, intersectionality, and cross-cultural claims to the right to the city.  Key questions include:

1) How is the co-constitutive production of urban spaces and the subject articulated in multi-sited research centered on gender, race, sexuality, class and nation?

2) How do the spaces examined by these panelists serve as simultaneous sites of domination and potential for change and expression?

3) What is the role of the city in the production of pleasures, disenchantment, fear, pain, care and other affective economies?

4) What frameworks used in these studies can be drawn upon and/or critiqued by gender and sexuality historians conducting related work across periods and regions?

5) How do these studies challenge binary hierarchies of rural/urban; idyllic past/modern future; closet/outness; closed/open; margin/center; and poverty/wealth that rely on universalist framings of the history of urban areas?