Call for Papers - Women at Work: Rhetorics of Gender and Labor in the US

Call for Papers

Women at Work: Rhetorics of Gender and Labor in the US

David Gold and Jessica Enoch are seeking contributions for an edited collection, Women at Work: Rhetorics of Gender and Labor in the US.

We invite scholars to submit proposals for essays that examine both historical and contemporary discourses surrounding women, gender, and work in the United States. We hope contributors will explore arguments for women’s entrance into various professions, careers, and work opportunities as well as the rhetorical conditions and constraints that have framed women's professional advancement and gendered labor. We welcome studies of formal sites of employment and economic activity such as labor activism and union work as well as less visible sites of work such as the home, community, and informal networks of association among women. Our goal is to create a collection that offers a diverse range of subjects, cultural sites, and historical moments from scholars both established and emerging.

Anticipated questions that will shape the volume include:

• How have women argued for their participation in varied professions and work environments?
• How have women claimed expertise, qualifications, and or training?
• How have women envisioned and articulated new or alternative understandings of work and professionalization?
• What rhetorical, socio-political, cultured, raced, embodied, and/or physical conditions have shaped women's participation in professions and types of work? How have women leveraged and/or negotiated these conditions?
• What public anxieties have been provoked by women entering professional spaces? How have women responded?
• How has work been gendered? How is this gendering inflected and informed by race, class, physical ability, culture, and sexuality?
• What kinds of work have been etched into or erased from public memory?
• What has and has not counted as work? What work by women remains invisible?

Interested scholars should email queries or proposals (consisting of a 300-word abstract, 75-word bio, and vita) by September 30, 2015, to David Gold (dpg@umich.edu) and Jess Enoch (jenoch1@umd.edu).