25 June 2021
SHaME and the Research Centre for the Humanities (Athens) will be holding a workshop to problematise the western subject through an exploration of sexual violence in the “European south”, broadly defined.
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SV in S.EUR-programme-June-2021
25 June 2021
Online
This workshop, co-hosted by SHaME and the Research Centre for the Humanities (Athens) seeks to problematise the western subject through an exploration of sexual violence in the “European south”, broadly defined. Early social anthropologists reported a certain “cultural unity” within the European south and the Mediterranean (Pitt-Rivers, 1963). According to such perspectives, the social values of “honour and shame” in southern Europe were grounded in deeply gendered understandings of family honour, in which men were cast as its holders and protectors, while female honour was more directly linked to sexuality, experienced and expressed as shame. Yet, more recent scholarship has highly criticised this notion of “cultural unity” (Herzfeld, 1980, 1998; Gilmore 1987), highlighting the diverse manifestations of honour and shame within the European south, and stressing the existence of this “culture of honour” in other geographical areas of the world.
Southern European gender models and the implications of these on the study of sexual violence in the western world are relatively under-theorised within broader narratives of the western subject. This workshop seeks to address this lacuna through an exploration of the intersection of southern European culture—understood through the prism of “unity in diversity” (Horden and Purcell 2000)—and sexual violence in the modern period. A thorough comparison of sexual violence within the diverse localities of the European south will allow similarities and differences to emerge, and will help to decentre current emphasis on the English-speaking world within the current historiography on sexual violence.
The event will take place online and will adopt a workshop format. Participants will be invited to submit a 4000-5000-word draft by 31 October 2020, and will present a 15-minute version of this paper on the day of the workshop. In addition, each participant will be paired with another attendee, and will be expected to provide a 5-minute discussion of their partner’s written work during their session. Selected papers will be invited to submit an extended full paper for a peer-reviewed publication or a collective volume.
The deadline for submitting a paper proposal has now passed. If you would like to attend the workshop as an observer, please contact stephanie.wright@bbk.ac.uk