Evil Women; Women and Evil

Evil Women; Women and Evil The Evil Project: The 8th Global Meeting Call for Presentations 2016 Friday 23rd September – Sunday 25th September 2016 Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom Evil Women: Women and Evil seeks to engage fruitful discourse over the core theme of evil and monstrous women, and the variations thereof. We are welcoming papers, workshops, performances, talks, film demonstrations and photo exhibitions. Let us see. Let us feel. Let us touch. Let us hear. From Medea and Lady Macbeth, to Mary Tudor and Eva Peron, to Myra Hindley and Dorothea Puente, to human rights activists working to prevent violence targeted at women, the human imagination has been captured by the complex relationship between women and evil. We are fascinated by stories of real and fictional women who perpetrate evil deeds, experience evil as victims, fight against evil and take the blame as scapegoats for evil that exists in the world. These accounts raise a host of questions about the nature of evil itself and why cultural cues encourage us to see the relationship between women and evil in very different terms from the way we understand the relationship between men and evil. What distinguishes evil from something that is simply at odds with gender roles, laws and other means of regulating behaviour? Why are women vilified as monsters, temptresses, bitches and evil incarnate when they break the rules? Is the emotionally- and ideologically-loaded language of evil is even useful in this context, or is an entirely different framework needed? The Evil Women: Women and Evil research stream of The Evil Project offers a space for inter-, cross- and multi-disciplinary explorations of these and other questions concerning the dynamics of the relationship between women and evil. We invite proposals for presentations that take the form of talks, workshops, performances, readings, film screenings, art installations with commentary and other interactive content. Activists, anthropologists, archaeologies, archivists, artists and other creative professionals, civil servants, members of the clergy, clinicians, correctional authorities, historians, journalists, jurists and other legal professionals, military personnel, researchers, writers and others with an interest in the project are encouraged to submit proposals on themes that include but are not limited to: We welcome submissions from within specific disciplinary boundaries, but we are also particularly interested in interdisciplinary contributions that balance the scope of insight that disciplines bring with the limitations that disciplinary boundaries create in failing to recognise cross-disciplinary connections, which neglect important historical and cultural perspectives on the development of the 'erotic' as a locus of attention. Consequently, we are particularly keen to encourage submissions that are not subsumed within disciplines, but cut across and between disciplinary vocabularies to provide new synergies, domains and inter-disciplinary possibilities. We warmly welcome proposals which go beyond traditional paper presentations and encompass also panels, performances and workshops. Themes to be explored range across a wide number of areas, including: Theology, Theodicy and Religion: - Women who theorise about evil - Theological considerations of case studies involving women - Alternative religious perspectives on the relationship between women and evil - Female deities and spirits - Considerations of whether evil committed by women inherently different from evil committed by men - Explorations of the relevance and usefulness of the language of evil to discuss unlawful or immoral behaviour Big Evils/Lesser Evils? - Women and genocide, genital mutilation, murder, sexual abuse, torture, human trafficking, drug smuggling, etc. - Women who experience or perpetuate social evils: racism, sexism, homophobia, economic deprivation, corporate exploitation, environment devastation, etc. Multi-cultural and Historical Perspectives: - Indigenous/tribal traditions concerning women, femininity and evil - Folk lore dealing with women, femininity and evil - Assessments of changing attitudes toward the relationship between women and evil (and the sources of those changes) Women and the Law: - Case studies of women whose crimes are considered evil - Accounts of experiences with women who have either perpetrated or suffered from acts considered evil - Legal trends in cases that involve women whose conduct has been coded as evil - Activism on behalf of female perpetrators and victims - Deviant sexuality Women and Medicine: - Clinical perspectives on female perpetrators and victims - The medical establishment as locus of evil – and the women who must engage with it Women and Power: - Considerations of the relationship between power and evil, and whether women can gain and maintain power without doing things that others perceive as evil or monstrous - Revenge plots - Personnel management strategies for regulating the workplace - Self-help and professional development models for gaining/maintaining/managing power in the workplace - Women and Evil in the News Media - Journalistic case studies, including first-hand accounts of how particular stories were presented for public consumption - Contemporary, historical, or comparative assessments of language and imagery used in reports about female perpetrators Representations of any aspect of monstrous femininity, women who perpetrate evil, women who fight against evil, women who suffer from evil perpetrated by others and women who are scape-goated as the source of evil in: - literature - cinema - television - film - visual arts - music Women and War - Women as warriors and efforts to protect the 'fairer sex' from combat - Women and war crimes - Holocaust narratives: women as oppressors and victims - Female jihadists, freedom fighters, terrorists Further details and information can be found at the conference website: http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/evil/evil-women-and-the-feminine/call-for-papers/ Details of our review policy can be found here: http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/evil/evil-women-and-the-feminine/call-for-papers/venue-and-accommodation/ What to Send 300 word abstracts, proposals and other forms of contribution should be submitted by Friday 22nd April 2016. All submissions be minimally double reviewed, under anonymous (blind) conditions, by a global panel drawn from members of the Project Team and the Advisory Board. In practice our procedures usually entail that by the time a proposal is accepted, it will have been triple and quadruple reviewed. You will be notified of the panel's decision by Friday 6th May 2016. If your submission is accepted for the conference, a full draft of your contribution should be submitted by Friday 5th August 2016. Abstracts may be in Word, RTF or Notepad formats with the following information and in this order: a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in programme, c) email address, d) title of proposal, e) body of proposal, f) up to 10 keywords. E-mails should be entitled: Evil Women Abstract Submission Where to Send Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to the Organising Chairs with listed emails: Organising Chairs: Natalia Kaloh Vid: nkv@inter-disciplinary.net Rob Fisher: ew8@inter-disciplinary.net This event is an inclusive interdisciplinary research and publishing project. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. A significant number of eBooks and paperback volumes have already emerged from the work of the Evil project. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference must be in English and will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s). All publications from the conference will require editors, to be chosen from interested delegates from the conference. Ethos Inter-Disciplinary.Net believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make this commitment, please do not submit an abstract for presentation. Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.