The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be hosting the Fifth Annual Graduate Symposium on Women’s and Gender History on March 11-13, 2004. The symposium will continue its mission of encouraging scholarship in the fields of women’s and gender history across various disciplines. This year’s symposium will include papers on wide-ranging topics, such as health and hygiene, immigrant women’s experiences, female “norms” and identities, the construction of masculinity, and colonialism and violence, among others. Not only will the symposium be an opportunity for everyone to listen to innovative and exciting ideas from graduate students from across the United States and Canada, it will also offer a forum where new perspectives and approaches on women’s and gender history can be generated.

We are very pleased that Professor Thomas Laqueur of the University of California, Berkeley will deliver the symposium’s keynote address on Friday, March 12th at 4 pm. His talk, entitled “Solitary Sex and the Question of Gender,” will address the emergence of masturbation as both a moral and medical practice of sexuality as well as its impact on the ethics of the self in the eighteenth century.

See below for the full schedule of the symposium.

For additional information, please consult our Web site.

All events will be held at:

Levis Faculty Center
919 West Illinois Street
Urbana, Illinois 61801

Unless otherwise noted.

Thursday, March 11 7:30-9:00 P.M.

Opening Panel – Comments by Professor Laqueur
“Science” and Making Sex: Constructing the Ephemeral Male Body and Masculinity Room 407

9:00 P.M. Music Room

Friday, March 12

9:00-10:30 A.M.

Engendering Modernity Through “Proper” Health and Hygiene
Music Room

Dressing the Part: Performing Gender, Class and Ethnicity
Room 407

10:00 A.M.

History Seminar with Professor Laqueur
300C Gregory Hall

10:45-12:15 P.M.

Immigrant Women’s Experience in Twentieth-Century America
Music Room

Female Bodies Made Public Subjects or Objects of Scrutiny
Room 407

2:15-3:45 P.M.

Containing Gendered and Racialized Others: Rhetorically, Physically and Spatially
Music Room

Female “Norms” and Identities Re-presented and Challenged
Room 407

4:00 P.M.

Keynote Address sponsored by CAS/MillerComm, “Solitary Sex and the Question of Gender,” Professor Thomas Laqueur, University of California, Berkeley Third Floor

Awarding of the 2004 Gender & History Graduate Student Essay Prize
Third Floor

6:00-7:30 P.M.

Reception, Co-Sponsored by the Spurlock Museum, Gender & History, and the Department of History
Spurlock Museum

Saturday, March 13

9:00-10:30 P.M.

Colonialism, Violence and Writing Back from the Post-Colony
Music Room

The Body – A Site for Masculine and Feminine Ideals and Aesthetics
Room 407

10:45-12:15 P.M.

African Women in Diaspora – Resistance and Representation
Music Room

Female Activists in Search of Enfranchisement and Emancipation
Room 407

12:30-2:00 P.M.

Roundtable Lunch Discussion on “Crossing Boundaries”
Third Floor

2:15-3:45 P.M.

Racialized and Gendered Spheres in American Higher Education
Music Room

Family and Citizenship – for the Nation and for Empire
Room 407

4:00-5:30

Constructing the Nation through the Lens of Gender
Music Room

Pushing Societal Boundaries: Women in “Male” Spaces, Men in “Female” Spaces
Room 407