The present call for papers targets geographers, developers, town planners, political scientists and sociologists who address gender issues in their research. We are also interested in research work in connection with territorial authorities, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, non-profits, social housing organizations, and representatives of trade unions and business. We strongly encourage young researchers to submit papers and/or posters on their thesis work in relation to the present call. We would be particularly interested in scientific proposals on film which explore the spatialization of gender relations and such work would have its place in the Biennial. We plan to publish (in a collective work or in journals) papers of particular relevance to the questions and approaches outlined below.

Key Dates

Please submit a one-page abstract (300 words at most) on this online application before May 22, 2012;
Notification of acceptance will be made by June 29, 2012
The full papers should arrive no later than October 10, 2012

Three main questions will serve as guidelines for the symposium:

•    From a theoretical point of view: in what respect may ‘intersectionality’ (gender, class, race, sexuality, age) open new vistas for the male/female dialectic of the relation to space? How do practices, processes of (social, sexual, spatial) domination and/or differentiation constitute singular articulations with place, territory or time? What new space-related norms or gender categorization are being built, or on the contrary dissolved, in other forms of discrimination? In what respect are care theories changing our social and spatial perspective on space and society?

•    From an empirical, methodological point of view: how may we observe, represent and make explicit the relation to gender, heteronormativity and intersectionality in its spatial, temporal, cultural, social, economic and political manifestations? What postures are adopted, what bodies of information are created, what methodologies are deployed to link gender relations to space?

•    From the point of view of geographical science: to what extent does geographical learning obtained through a gender approach horizontally concern several fields; urbanity-rurality-periurbanity, tourism, development, territories and territoriality, bodies, minorities; and built around multiple objects, to what extent does such learning contribute to the pluridisciplinary debate on gender issues? In what respect does it enable us to confront gender approaches within geography, while contributing to debate on gender in other disciplines? How too have gender studies contributed to advancing conceptual constructs specific to geography?

These questions will spread horizontally into the three perspectives summarized below:

•    Perspective 1: Gender, movement and circulation of persons

Individual practices reveal the ways that social subjects operate and organize themselves in their customs and relations to place and time. The effect of the approach adopted for legible sexed practices (Coutras J.,1989), through the dissymmetry and hierarchy of frequentation which contribute to building limitations, borders between the spaces in which men and women indulge in such practices, and to the management of temporalities – ‘territorial channel surfing’ (Friberg, 1993, Chardonnel, Louargant, 2007) – has been to transcribe the male/female relation in the quotidian and explain new forms of territoriality (Louargant, 2003). At present, analysis of movement reveals the hybrid character of composite spatial objects in a metropolitan context (Cattan N., 2010). Movement interconnects, revealing strategies for adapting to or anticipating changing contexts: metropolitanization, international migration (work, tourism, exile, marriage). Such behaviour, and mobility and migration practices potentially portend and signify hybridity (Saïd E. 1983, Berdoulay, Entrikin, 1998), intersectionality (W-Crenshaw, 1995; Bilge S. 2010, Marius-Gnanou K. 2010) or mestization (Gouda F., 2011).

The aim here is therefore to discuss the respective merits of each posture in the analysis and observation of the gender relation to movement in the practice of space (leisure activities, forms of dwelling, everyday life, virtuality, spatiality and emerging forms of territoriality) or in the manifestation of other kinds of territory (Jaurand E., Leroy S., 2011).

•    Perspective 2: Gender, body and otherness

The principles of domination and power are constitutive of the relations which individuals and groups entertain with space and society. Individuals are also the embodiment of a social body (Tovar, 2010) visible in the production of spaces and norms (Haraway, 1991). The construction of ‘natural’ sexed roles (J. Butler, 1993) leads us to conceptualize these bodies in a heteronormative manner masking the effects of sexuality in social relations, establishing de facto social relations which are generally heterosexual, patriarchal, virile or homophobic (Raibaud Y., 2007) and sidelining sexual bodies which are indeterminate and do not confirm gender norms. But the geography of sexuality (Bell D., Valentine G., 1995, Blidon M., 2008) induces divergences in the construction of and discourse on public space. What is at issue here is the relation to the Other, the relation which expresses the limitations imposed by a society which forgets the body and sexuality of individuals and constructs a ‘spatial pretext for rejecting the Other’, particularly virulent with regard to minorities (Hancock C. 2005, 2011, Young M.). The body is consequently a post-colonial geopolitical issue, manifesting itself in public place, in experience, and in the relation to plasticity, borders, art and travel which is ‘an experience of the body’ (Staszak J.F., 2003, 2011). Bodies are all the more visible and disturbing in the public space when naked (Barthe F., 2010). They consequently raise questions about healthcare in prevention, the conception of reproduction and the exploitation of bodies.

Our purpose here is to debate the merits of individual or collective production of bodies and sexuality in their gender relation to space, to place, time, art, borders and the public space.

•    Perspective 3: Gender, fragility and resources

Particularly detailed analysis in the South has focused on the gender systems in relations of production and reproduction in the articulation between market and non-market relations (Boserup E., 1970). Differentiated access, for men and women, to skills and learning, to control of environmental resources, in particular – water, land, plants (Granié A.M., Guétat H., 2005, 2008) – and of economic and cultural resources (Bensahel L., Louargant S., 2005), highlighted the impacts, effects and changes in gender relations by identifying the emergence of new capacities, new social and spatial relations. At the same time the contribution of work on gender relations in forms of work and industrialization (Hanson S., G. Pratt, 1995, D. Massey, 1995) and on gender discrimination has increasingly focused on the spatial impacts of the division  of labour, with regard to gender and class effects. But, in the present post-industrial context, the reproduction of various forms of discrimination based on gender, race, age and socio-economic status poses, with contemporary acuteness, the dilemma of redistribution and/or recognition, and the question of social justice (Fraser N., 2005, 2010). This suggests, explicitly and implicitly, that we should address the way male/female relations express themselves in their capacity to recreate themselves or rebuild links between genders and individuals. The narrative of development is ambiguous because it promotes a vision of progress that is both social (in its emancipatory dimension, but that of a singular, market-based freedom, of salaried employment and monetary mobilization) and technical (now at issue around the idea of sustainability). The incorporation of a category of the discourse, of the emancipatory narrative promoted by international bodies and inscribed in Amartya Sen’s theories of human development and well-being, has demonstrated the capacity of women’s networks to act and the transformation of the male in the field of development and action (participation, empowerment, micro-credits; Marius-Gnanou K., 2003, Louargant 2003).
Male/female relations may thus be changed, which in turn raises the question of the dynamic of both feminities and masculinities, in particular when the roles of each and everyone are evolving in the field of development and action.

Our purpose here is therefore to debate the merits of starting afresh and making explicit the male-female relations and learning processes with regard to the (economic, environmental, cultural, social, urban, rural and risk-related) vulnerability and fragility of territories in the North and South. This may also entail determining how such forms of fragility manifest themselves in public spaces through societal interfaces (art, advertising and media) and what allowance is made for such fragility in public, urban and territorial policies and in the elaboration of an emancipatory project, actively mobilizing residents.


  Scientific director: Sophie Louargant, Lecturer-researcher in geography and territorial development, UMR Pacte, CNRS 5194, Grenoble.