Gender, the Refugee and Displacement (1900-1950)
Newcastle University, Friday 5th July 2013

This interdisciplinary one-day symposium will interrogate the links between gender and displacement from the turn of the twentieth century, through both World Wars and into the post-war period. Addressing a crucial gap in scholarship surrounding displacement and gender within the critical canon of war studies, it asks how gender influences or impacts displacement during the two world wars and how, in particular, men and women experience and represent displacement differently? It interrogates the historic association of the refugee with the female, existing outside the symbolic order and beyond the nation, particularly at times of war (Plain, 1994). It addresses the embodied experience of displacement, such as the tendency for refugees and Internally Displaced People to experience rape, torture and physical violence as well as other forms of emotional or physical hardship, as well as the representation of displacement in literary, biographical and historical works with relation to ideas around gender and empowerment during this period. In particular, this conference brings together academics working across the disciplines, looking at the intersections between gender and displacement in a range of discourses legal and historical, literary and political, artistic and geographical in and around the two world wars.