Presenters are sought for a panel on sexuality, gender, social justice and human rights for this year’s American Anthropological Association meeting to be held in Montreal from November 16-20, 2011.

In line with the AAA conference theme “Traces, Tidemarks and Legacies,” the panel explores temporality in human rights and social justice movements concerning sexuality, gender, the family, and relatedness. Such rights-based struggles may include contestations over access to asylum, marriage, reproductive rights, LGBT anti-discrimination legislation, dress, religious expression, and gendered access to education, health care, or waged labor, among others. Researchers may also address the United Nation’s Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) reform and its 1948 Declaration of Universal Human Rights, or the recent introduction of the Yogyakarta Principles.

The ebb and flow of rights that occurs within values-based politicized movements may be understood by their participants from a range of perspectives, including secular humanist, scientific, religious, geographical, linguistic, and socioeconomic. Multiple, overlapping temporalities frame the practical, ethical and ideological social practice of human rights and social justice movements.

We call for papers that address the intersections between how temporalities overlap, inform, organize, abstract, historicize, hybridize, and/or manage these struggles with special concern for how the ideas of ethical progress, hope, justice, or emancipation are worked thorough them. In doing so, papers may also analyze how time is managed and understood in specific social justice movements reflecting differentiation from or synchronicity with dominant transnational human rights regimes and discourses.

How do sexual, reproductive and gender justice movements orient their participants in time, evoking shared nostalgia or antipathy for past eras; responsibility and a sense of immediacy for the present; and, longing for near or distant futures? How do the concerns with intimacy, embodiment, and cultural or religious distinctiveness that animate some sexuality and gender based rights struggles relate to the ways in which temporalities are affectively orchestrated and what does this say about modes of activism pattered within these justice movements? How is the temporal register of calls for human rights distinct from that of social justice? How do race, class, age and various other minority statuses affect the formation of coalitions and the confluence of movement legacies? And, what are the tidemarks social justice movements use to reflectively evaluate and replicate their own advances within the historical trajectories imagined by their participants?

Potential avenues for exploring sexuality, gender and justice in a temporal key may include but are not limited to: queering theology and/or tradition; global evangelism; feminist antecedents to gender/reproductive movements; feminist praxis in the digital age; “fluidity” in sexual identity as multiple temporalities; social media and political organizing; progressivism; neoliberal empire building and the global recession; marriage as transgression; civil rights and postcolonial legacies; sharia law and the critique of universalism; and, the engine of capital in human rights movements.

If you are interested in joining this panel, please email an abstract to Alisa Perkins (alisaperkins@gmail.com) or Michelle Marzullo (michelle.marzullo@gmail.com) by March 7, 2011.

Thank you!

Alisa Perkins, PhD Candidate, Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin and

Michelle Marzullo, PhD Candidate, Anthropology, American University