The "Con/vergences: Critical Interventions in the Politics of Race and Gender" Conference comprises one (1) keynote speech and six (6)panels, which are featured on seven (7) separate DVDs. The cost of each DVD is $25 plus shipping and handling for individuals (jewel case only, no printed material) and $100 plus shipping and handling for institutions. A 25% discount is applied to the purchase of the complete set of 7 DVDs. Go back to the conference main page under the "Events" heading and tab on "More Info" for a complete description of the DVD's content.

#1 — Keynote speech: “The Intimacies of Four Continents”

#2 — Panel 1: “Race, Gender and the Nation-State”
This panel will explore the role of nation-states in producing and maintaining racialized and gendered hierarchies.  It will interrogate how the political form of the nation-state has historically been constituted through racialized and gendered practices, as well as how contemporary nation-state policies are shaped by the intersecting interests of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism.  In looking at how the state is implicated in both the discursive and structural operations of race and gender, the panel will pay specific attention to the ways that the state manages the convergences and contradictions between white supremacy and patriarchy.  Additionally, the panel will work toward complicating ideas of inclusion and exclusion in order to diversify our understandings of the processes by which marginalized groups achieve representation within the state without significantly transforming state sanction hierarchies.  It will examine how these groups make claims upon the state and, in doing so, may tacitly consent to oppressive state practices.  Possible issues this panel might address include: citizenship and national belonging, the welfare state, militarism and state violence, colonial and post-colonial states, immigration, the law.

#3 — Panel 2: “Race and Masculinities”
This panel seeks to investigate how racialized subjects in the United States construct, embody, perform, contest, etc, various shades of masculinity.   What are the forces that underlie contemporary performances of masculinity by persons (both male and female) of color?   Can such performances  be construed as counter-hegemonic ?    Or do they merely reinforce a traditional disparity in power along lines of sex and/or gender?    What does the study of racialized masculinities have to offer to the political project of ethnic studies and women studies respectively and collectively?    What are the intellectual and political consequences of disavowing particular constructions / manifestations  of gender (i.e. masculinity and/or femininity) when critically examining race and sex?

#4 — Panel 3: “Toward an Indigenous Feminism: Nationalism and Gender in Native American Studies”
In order to shift attention onto the heterogeneity and multiplicity of indigenous nations' political projects in Native American Studies, growing numbers of indigenous scholars are interrogating the conceptual and discursive limits of Native nationalism.  Two urgent and overlapping questions this panel will explore are what kinds of new nationalist configurations are possible and at what level do they incorporate feminist concerns.  Do new Native nationalisms perpetuate or dismantle masculinist nationalisms?  How do indigenous feminists or Native women nationalists seek to end contemporary manifestations of women's oppression in Indigenous communities?  Does the reluctance to speak of Native American feminism highlight the antagonism between nationalist resistance and the gendered distribution of labour and power?  Or, are Native American feminisms contradictory or complementary to more traditional teachings of gender in Native societies?  This panel will explore the validity of Native American feminisms against and within nationalist discourse.

#5 — Panel 4: “Sexualizing the Racial Body”
This panel will examine both the processes by which the racializing and  sexualizing of bodies are intertwined and the differentiated ways that racialized, sexualized representations of the body circulate in discursive and material transactions.  In particular, the panel asks: How do the material conditions of capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy delimit the discursive production of desire? How are these desires acted on in a variety of everyday practices such as sex, work, community formation, and violence? Finally, what effects do these practices have in reproducing or destabilizing existing social relations?   Themes the panel might address include the convergences between racial othering and the production of sexual deviance and normativity, sexual economies, medical and scientific discourses of the body, violence, sexual practices, the construction of sexual communities, the commodification of bodies, and how dominant constructions of the sexualized and racialized body are resisted.

#6 — Panel 5: “Transnational Political Economics”
Social scientists and humanities scholars argue that the globalization of capital exerts immense cultural, economic, and political pressures on the sovereignty of nation-states, as well as on the lives of people the world over.  How do such policies affect the way women and people of color think about race and gender?  What are the consequences of such policies for women and people of color in North America?  This panel will draw on contemporary debates about transnational political economy in such disciplines as critical race studies, cultural studies, historical materialism, diasporic studies and critical empire studies to examine the politics of race and gender in the context of economic globalization.  For instance, how does transnational capital affect diasporic migrations of women laborers?   How does the deployment of race and gender in corporate globalization and neoliberal capitalism impel people to cross national borders in search of work?  Panelists may consider the socio-historical pressures that global capitalism  exerts on nation-state and subjecthood; displacement; multiple migrations; and constructions of home for women and people of color.  They may take into account resistance movements (e.g., "globalization from below" and anti-corporate global activism) and the material forces of neoliberal economics that inform and alter racial and gendered meanings of nation-state borders and citizenship.

#7 — Panel 6: “Reconstructing History and Resistance”
History has experienced the disciplinary growing pains endemic to the post-World War II university as historiography has had to confront its own power and prejudices.  The intellectual fall-out from the various civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s in the United States has been an increased institutional awareness of and teaching about indigenous, immigrant, and diasporic histories. But is the recuperation and narrativization of these various histories enough to truly challenge the philosophic assumptions underlying the systems of oppression that facilitate disempowerment and exploitation in the first place, or is a more vital and revolutionary conception of capital "H" history in order?

This panel will explore the meaning of history and historiography for communities of color at the turn of the millennium.   Can scholars continue simply to posit counter-narratives to the Anglo-hegemony and expect those counter-narratives to affect real social change, or does historical narrative itself constitute a kind of oppressive regime, and if so, what strategies of resistance are left to U.S. scholars today?