Working the Empire. Gendered conversations and circulations

Workshop organized by Jennifer Boittin (Paris IAS fellow) and Rebecca Rogers (Paris Descartes University) with the support of the CERLIS (Centre de recherche sur les liens sociaux) and the MAGE (Réseau de recherche international et pluridisciplinaire "Marché du travail et genre)

Presentation

The title « Working the Empire/Travailler l’Empire » reflects the overlapping themes of this workshop.  Literally we will explore the multiple ways that women and men turned to overseas empires to find work, whether legal or illegal. Figuratively we will consider how women and men worked the imperial administrative system to obtain - often while employing language shaped by gender - certain rights, such as the right to privacy, the right to work and the right to circulate freely. This workshop will also probe how imperial horizons shaped the work of those living in metropolitan France, for example in their private or public writings or via the creation of associations with imperial ties. Finally, a third theme, articulated via the subtitle « Gendered conversations and circulations / Conversations et circulations genrées »  will provoke those participating to discuss sources, methods and approaches, in other words the theoretical and historiographical intersections that inspire and orient their research and writing. This encounter invites researchers to converse in a convivial and bilingual format among other things to decompartmentalize the dialogue between specialists of the British and the French empires, including via a joint consideration of the heuristic uses of gender in (post)colonial spaces.

Program

Monday, June 19th

9h00   Welcome

9h30   Preliminary comments
Jennifer Boittin (IEA de Paris) & Rebecca Rogers (Université Paris Descartes)

9h45 - 12h00   Session 1: Working the archive: Thinking about Sources and Gender
Moderator: Delphine Gardey (Université de Genève)

Enslaved Wet Nurses and Migration from France's Colonies to the Metropole, 1763-1848
Sue Peabody (Washington State University Vancouver)

Voix de colonisées et archives coloniales
Anne Hugon (Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne)

Les subalternes peuvent-elles saisir l'administration ? Requêtes écrites de femmes de Kabylie aux autorités françaises (années 1930)
Emmanuel Blanchard (Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines)

12h00 - 13h30   Lunch Break

13h30 - 15h00   Session 2: Nouvelles perspectives et la jeune recherche
Moderator: Myriam Paris (Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne | Paris Nanterre)

La domesticité féminine européenne aux colonies : les Espagnoles en Algérie, une migration de travail transcoloniale au prisme du genre
Nassima Mekaoui-Chebout (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales | IRMC)

Sexe sans Frontières : Prostitution, Imperial Mobility, and Racial Boundaries in the Interwar Period
Caroline Sequin (University of Chicago)

Qu’est-ce qu’une famille de salarié africain ? Débats autour de l’instauration des allocations familiales dans l’Union française (1950-1956)
Louise Barré (LAM | Bordeaux-Montaigne)

“Un idéal de dévouement”: French Stagiaires in the Algerian Service des Centres Sociaux, 1955-1962
Brooke Durham (Stanford University)

15h00 - 15h30   Pause

15h30 - 18h00   Session 3: Working Representations: Sex, Sexuality and Mobility in an Imperial World
Moderator: Fabio Giomi (CNRS, CETOBAC)

Travel, Trafficking, and Illicit Migration Through and Beyond the Empire
Elisa Camiscioli (SUNY Binghamton)

Est-il possible de parler de "tourisme sexuel" au Maghreb et au Machrek pour le XIX^e siècle ?
Christelle Taraud (NYU University Paris)

Les non- / dits des femmes en AOF et en Indochine : Comment parler de plaisir en partant des archives ?
Jennifer Boittin (IEA de Paris | Penn State University)

Mesdames Tirailleurs : le travail conjugal et la migration légitime dans l'Afrique française au XIX^e siècle
Sarah Zimmerman (Western Washington University)

Tuesday, June 20th

9h00   Welcome

9h30 - 12h00   Session 4: Working the Methods, Challenging the Narratives
Moderator: Marie Salaün (Université Paris Descartes)

L'association des femmes de l'Union française : action sociale et impérialisme au lendemain de la Seconde guerre mondiale
Pascale Barthélémy (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyon)

Gender at the Crossroads: Political Belonging and Mobility in a Franco-African World, 1946-1979
Emily Burrill (UNC Chapel Hill)

Speaking out about Women's place in Empire, from Napoleon to the Early Third Republic
Rebecca Rogers (Université Paris Descartes)

Circling Circuits of Power: Intimacies of Empire: and Trans-Imperial Knowledge Circulation
Joyce Goodman (University of Winchester)