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General Information

Gender Matters is an academic conference highlighting research on gender, women, and sexuality across all disciplines and historical periods.

Conference planners seek to bring together students, activists, and researchers to discuss the ongoing role of gender in structuring society.

Conference Name

The conference name playfully invokes the germinal work of Judith Butler referencing:

• Gender Trouble 
• Bodies that Matter 

Broadly, conference planners invite work on all matters of gender. More specifically, we are particularly interested in work that explicates how gender matters, and continues to matter, in our world.

2013 Theme: Continuities & Instabilities

Click here to download a pdf of the 2013 Gender Matters conference program. 

Keynote Address 

Jack Halberstam is a Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies, and Comp. Lit. at USC and an internationally recognized feminist and queer theorist. Halberstam is the author of Female Masculinity, In a Queer Time and Place, and The Queer Art of Failure. Halberstam's address will be based on a new book coming out in September titled GAGA Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal. The text offers “a hard look at the meaning of family, sex, intimacy, parenting and childhood at a time of great social upheaval. ‘Gaga’ is the term given to the sense of a system gone wild.”  

Featured Performance 

M. Heather Carver will be presenting the featured performance titled Booby Trap: A Hair-Raising Experience, a one-woman play about surviving breast cancer one laugh at a time. Carver is an Associate Professor of Playwriting &Performance Studies and The University of Missouri. She received the 2004 Chancellor's Award for MU Women for her work as Artistic Director and co-founder of the Troubling Violence Performance Project, a troupe that performs personal narratives about domestic/relationship violence. She co-authored Troubling Violence: A Performance Project, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2009.  

Featured Film

 Laurens Grant will be presenting the featured screening and filmmaker talk, as the Director of the documentary Rokia: Voice of a New Generation. Rokia grew up the daughter of a diplomat and was raised in Africa, the Middle East and Europe. When she was high school-age student, her family returned to Mali to live for a short period before relocating again to Europe. While in Bamako, Mali’s capital, it was a turbulent period. People were in the streets en masse calling for democratic reforms and an end to decades of dictatorship. The movement was energized by students; and their energy galvanized Rokia who decided to march in the streets with them.

Rokia: Voice of a New Generation is about how that political awakening helped Rokia find her voice and become a singer for women’s rights in conservative Mali. Her lyrics speak out against polygamy and when men refused to work with her, she became her own arranger, songwriter and boss, all without knowing how to read or write music. Rokia: Voice of a New Generation includes exclusive access to Rokia, her songwriting and rehearsal process, explores her musical roots from her family’s village in Mali, and includes rare footage of her collaboration with the Grammy-winning avant-garde string quartet Kronos Quartet. Rokia: Voice of a New Generation is ultimately about perseverance and how women who believe in themselves can control their own destiny.

Tentative Conference Schedule Overview

• 8:30–9:30 am: Registration, Breakfast, and Welcome
• 9:30–10:45 am: Concurrent Session 1                
• 11:00–12:00 pm: Concurrent Session 2                  
• 12:00–1:15 pm: Lunch (on your own)         
• 1:15–2:30 pm: Keynote Address - Gaga Feminism     
• 2:45–4:00: Concurrent Session 3                    
• 4:15–5:30 pm: Concurrent Session 4
• 5:30–7:00 pm: Reception