Call for papers: “Making gender” through the State: local reactions to global actions.

“Making gender” through the State: local reactions to global actions.
> Making gender in Africa, and in the whole world, should be seen as the
result of a complex interaction between forces produced at different
levels: local practices are interwoven with State programs, which are in
turn elaborated at a global scale by UN agencies and NGOs. As a whole,
these forces act in different fields, promoting different programs and
institutions with the aim of building new forms of gender
subjectivities: local forms of women’s or men’s cooperatives, public
health programs, hygiene awareness campaign, alphabetization or school
incentive programs for girls, campaign against prostitution are only a
few of the possible arenas in which local, national and global levels of
the contemporary African “making-gender processes” interact and
sometimes collide. Moreover, these fields become also a key to analyze
the State (Gupta 1995) and the way in which State practices and
discourses shape the reaction of the involved subjects, be they men or
women.
> Seeing gender as political project, this panel looks for ethnographical
and/or theoretical contributions which, drawing on cases taken from the
different sectors forming the State (public health, education, economy,
politics…), can shed light on the local mediations to global policies,
underlining the way in which they contribute to shape the State itself. 



Contact: > ilaria.buscaglia@gmail.com
> chiaraquagliariello@yahoo.it