Penn Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Conference Call for Presentations

University of Pennsylvania Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Graduate/Undergraduate Conference: Abolition

Abstracts Due: February 6th, 2023

Ruth Wilson Gilmore states “Abolition is about abolishing the conditions under which prison became the solution to problems, rather than abolishing the buildings we call prisons.” Abolition exists within the context of racialized, gendered, and ableist constructs of relating to one another as well. Angela Davis asks, “How can we produce a sense of belonging to communities that is not evaporated by the onslaught of our everyday routines?” Furthermore, Mia Mingus argues, “Any disability justice work should be in alignment and solidarity with abolition. And any abolition work should be in alignment and solidarity with disability justice.  Disability justice is abolition work and abolition work is disability justice work.” The context of abolition is not just a question of prisons or the prison industrial complex, but the very intricate ties people have to one another, the environment, labor, capital, and the uneven delineations of surveillance and control that stretch across the mundane and spectacular aspects of everyday life.

Queer, trans, and feminist imaginations across literature, art, geography, Indigenous studies, critical race theory, disability studies, queer of color critique, trans studies, and Black feminist theory have argued for abolition across the embodied, social, cultural, dystopian, and futurist realities of the networks that we move through daily. An abolitionist reality requires not only a re-orientation away from institutions and borders, but also requires a revaluation of labor, dependency, interdependency, as they relate to capital and exchange. What does an abolitionist future look like beyond utopian simplicity that considers the material realities of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, disability, and mobility?

This Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Conference aims to facilitate a discussion among graduate, undergraduate, and post-doc students at Penn and surrounding schools of what an abolitionist future looks like. We welcome abstracts from all disciplines and interdisciplinary conversations that share an interest in feminist, queer, and trans analysis.

The hybrid conference will take place April 15th 2023 and will feature undergraduate and graduate research by students across the University of Pennsylvania and surrounding institutions as well as a morning workshop and a keynote speaker. Participants will be asked to state their preference on in person or remote presentations. Remote presentations can be pre-recorded but must be captioned. All presentations, except for the workshop, will be available in hybrid form, with captioned text on Zoom for the duration of the day. The conference will end with a keynote from scholar Elias Rodriques. 

Abstracts for papers and presentations can be submitted here.

Please direct any questions to maeesk@design.upenn.edu or gswsconference23@gmail.com

Topics might include: 

Black feminist worldbuilding
Abolishing borders
Palestinian sovereignty
Urban food justice
Carceral themes in contemporary art or literature
Surveillance within the medical industrial complex
School to prison pipeline
Speculative, dystopian, and utopian futurity
Prison labor and its effects on late-stage capitalist market values
Community building beyond the nexus of the family
Disability justice
Transformative justice
Reproductive justice as an abolitionist framework
Environmental catastrophe and the prison industrial complex
Racialized strategies of incarceration
Potentialities of fugitivity
Critiques of trans inclusive prisons
Abolitionist approaches to social practice
Archival studies beyond the institution
Queer and trans abolitionist futures
Media surveillance of prison industrial complex within documentary television
Community based approaches to abolitionist praxis
Sex work, care work, and the valuation of labor & dependency
Transnational abolitionist futures
Black feminist movements in Latin America
Abolitionist organizing in the Global South