The Society for the History of Women in the Americas (SHAW) welcomes proposals for its annual conference, hosted by the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès.

This year’s conference invites papers on any topic relating to histories of women and gender non- conforming people in the Americas, but encourages proposals for papers, panels or roundtables that explore the subject of confinement.

Referring to a condition (being confined) or an action if it is imposed (confining), confinement implies constraints imposed on bodies and souls in physical as well as symbolic places and spaces: imprisonment, isolation, incarceration, detention. The scholarly literature has showed the confinement of women has been primarily organized due to restrictive visons of femininity and womanhood which must be contained. What does the confinement of women in societies reveal about these societies and their institutions? Is confinement meant to secure order, to constrain or to protect? To protect whom and from what?

The conference will of course consider the forms of resistance to confinement and/or to the forms of solidarity borne out of these forms of resistance, within and outside confined spaces. Can confinement be also read as a form of resistance? What forms of agency or spaces of agency does confinement or moving in or out of confinement create? The conference will also provide the opportunity to wonder whether there is a western theorization of the concept. How to read and write the history of the confinement(s) of women in the Americas? Confinement also applies to silencing and containing a particular group – women – or a particular group within a group. Can there be an intersectional, an inclusive and/or a feminist way of writing on the confinement of women in history? Confinement is not only purely special and physical. Papers might also discuss the metaphorical dimension of the term and the material realities such as the division between the private and public spheres, or consideration of the female body as a private space turned into a public territory for the culture wars.