The Women’s Network / Réseau des Femmes of the CAC / SCÉC invites submissions for their 2025 panel Queer Time and Gendered Space, which aims to bring the study of classical antiquity into further dialogue with feminist and queer perspectives (cf. Haselswerdt, Lindheim, and Ormand 2023).

Feminist geocritics like Doreen Massey and Gillian Rose have uncovered the gendering of space as a critical aspect of how patriarchal social systems maintain and enforce gender norms. Because the classification of spaces as exclusive or inclusive of specific genders has material implications for individuals’ mobility and sense of self, considering how spaces are designated as appropriate for particular gender expressions illuminates the mechanisms that reinforce traditional roles and relationships between people of all gender identities. Yet spaces and spatialities also hold promise for resisting oppression: urban space can be ‘rescripted’ to celebrate the agency of women outside the domestic sphere; and understandings of space as unfixed and heterogeneous can subvert oppressive delineations of who should be where.

Theorists of queer time like Jack Halberstam, Carolyn Dinshaw, Alison Kafer, and José Esteban Muñoz, likewise, have drawn attention to and rejected the ableist and heteronormative frameworks that delineate the individual life-course and the relationship of then to now. Queer temporalities disrupt the prescriptive progress from childhood to adulthood to parenthood to grave, and offer innovative ways to rethink the linear segmentation of past, present, and future. This challenge to conventional narratives allows for more fluid and expansive interpretations of identity and history, including the histories that we study and create as scholars of antiquity.

We warmly encourage all scholars and students interested these themes to apply. Contributions may include theoretical or methodological explorations, analyses of ancient texts or archaeological evidence, or original creative works. Topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Queer temporalities in antiquity, including e.g. queer futurity and crip time
• Prophecy as a queering of time
• Queering the ancient life-course
• Geographies of gendered oppression and resistance
• Ecofeminist readings of ancient texts/contexts/practices
• Queer representation in ancient gendered space and/or locating all-gender spaces
• Intersections of gender, space, and time in ritual practices
• Amateur vs. expert understandings of the ‘pastness’ of antiquity

Application Details

Abstracts in both French and English are welcome; they should be no more than 300 words, plus relevant bibliography.

Please submit your abstract by January 15 to sdennie@ualberta.ca and to cacwinnipeg2025@gmail.com, with your name and “abstract for 2025 WN panel” in the subject heading.

In the body of the email, include your full name, affiliation, contact information, and paper title.

Do not include your name in the abstract but please make sure that the title of the paper on the abstract and the title in the email are the same.

Please indicate in your email if you would like to have your abstract considered for the regular sessions if it is not included in the Women’s Network panel.

Graduate students should send a note of support from their supervisor along with the abstract.

Membership in the CAC is required for participation.

PDF of Call for Papers