Call for Submissions

The Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Mississippi is pleased to announce its 25th Annual Isom Student Gender Conference (ISGC). The ISGC is scheduled for Wednesday, March 26, through Friday, March 28, on the campus of the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi.

The “body politic” has long been a way to visualize society and its governing structures as a single imaginary body made up of real individual bodies. While this single imaginary body has changed shape throughout its historical development, the body politic remains an enduring metaphor for the social and political organization of groups of people and for our understanding of ourselves as a “we.” While this collective self-consciousness has its roots in the “royal we,” in which a singular governing figure speaks for the entire body, more contemporary liberation movements have imagined themselves as the voice of the “we” united by the same political and social motivations. Such movements relocate the voice of the “we” to the real individual bodies that have been subject to the disciplinary power of the body politic, thus transforming this singular concept into body politics. 

In her powerful text, The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love, activist and educator, Sonya Renee Taylor states that “a radical self-love world is a world free from the systems of oppression that make it difficult and sometimes deadly to live in our bodies. "[It is] a world that works for every body" (5). At the center of body politics are the interpersonal, societal, and structural struggles to maintain control over one’s own body, and thus one’s own experiences and futures. It spans from our individual choices about our bodies, to the structural factors that enrich, liberate, restrict, and threaten our bodies and lives. Our bodies are read by others to represent who we are—our identities, our heritage, our race, ethnicity, gender, and status are often assumed by others based on our bodily assemblage. And while these assumptions can be and are often incorrect, our superficial physical characteristics have historically become the basis for separating humans from one another—judging others on social constructions of difference. The ways in which we become categorized are often imposed upon us by systems of power. Feminist endeavors then move to challenge and undermine notions of the "standard," or "normal" body as always already white, male, able-bodied, heterosexual, and gender-conforming.

“The Body” is indeed a site of political debate and liberation. In a 2017 Unity Rally in New York City, political activist and author Angela Davis stated, “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” Body politics invites us to ask how we might imagine a world where we are not made to fight for bodily autonomy, or fight ourselves for bodily acceptance, and the various forms of activist work that continue to challenge our current political structures that continue to make us so vulnerable. What are we willing to fight for to change and how can we get there? How does pop culture contribute to these debates/fights/etc?  In response to current Supreme Court decisions and subsequent political objectives, this conference is interested in generating discourse about the ways in which our bodies (and thus lives) are perceived, policed, debated, and used as sites of resistance. We encourage participants to discuss issues about gender-affirming health care, reproductive freedoms and restrictions, disability justice, police brutality, abortion and contraceptive access, fatphobia, colorism, body positivity, anti-Black racism, rape culture, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, environmental issues, sexual politics, etc. We are also interested in the analysis of how pop culture has addressed (or not)  the aforementioned topics. 

Dr. Hil Malatino (Penn State) will deliver the conference's keynote, which will also serve as the Trans Studies Lecture.  

Submission deadline is  Dec 19, 2024. A small number of domestic travel grants will be made available to non-UM students.