The Comparative Gender Studies Committee works to further the comparative study of gender and sexuality through organizing innovative seminar programmes at the ICLA and at other conferences,such as the ACLA. The Committee supports research and publication in the relatively new fields of
comparative gender and comparative queer studies. We define ‘comparative’ in its broadest sense as an approach to the study of literature and culture that includes: a) traditional comparisons across national and linguistic borders as these relate specifically to gender and/or sexuality; b) comparative
work across historical, postcolonial, and transnational contexts focusing on gender and/or sexuality; and c) scholarship using gender and/or sexuality as sites of comparison themselves, or as they intersect with race, class, ethnicity, national and religious affiliation, and other sites of difference.
We also support research on the gender and queer politics of textual and/or cultural translation in all historical periods.
The work from our seminars is published in international peer-reviewed journals and in edited collections with major academic presses. Anyone with a scholarly interest in comparative gender/queer studies is invited to join the Committee, and we especially welcome graduate students.
The following are the publications of the Gender Studies Committee to date from the earliest to the
most recent work that is recently published and forthcoming.
Gender and Literary Studies. Special Issue of Comparative Critical Studies 6.2 (2009). Guest Editor Margaret R. Higonnet.
Von Flotow, Luise, ed. Translating Women. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010.
Hayes, Jarrod, Margaret R. Higonnet, and William J. Spurlin, eds. Comparatively Queer: Interrogating Identities across Time and Cultures. New York: Palgrave USA, 2010.
The Gender and Queer Politics of Translation: Literary, Historical, and Cultural Approaches. Special Issue of Comparative Literature Studies 51.2 (2014). Guest Editor William J. Spurlin.
Comparatively Speaking: Gender and Rhetoric. Special Issue of Intertexts 18.1 (2014). Guest Editors Liedeke Plate and Pierre Zoberman.
Critical Healing: Queer and Disability Studies Interventions in Biomedicine and Public Health. Special Issue of Journal of Medical Humanities. Forthcoming 2015. Guest Editors William J. Spurlin and Rebecca Garden.
