AHA Session 288
Sunday, January 10, 2027: 11:00 AM-12:30 PM
Studio 9 (New Orleans Marriott, 2nd Floor)
Papers:
Session Abstract
Our panel offers three case studies that span across three centuries in the territory that is now the United States of America. We focus our discussion on three spaces and the gendered forms through which they are experienced, articulated, read, disputed and presented. In the three cases, the contrast between the perspective of the historical subjects, their society, and present assumptions about the gender roles’ past underscore the malleability and instability of gendered institutions.What does it mean for a woman or female-assigned subject to occupy a position that defies gender roles? Whose definition of gender roles should the historian pay attention to? Our panel offers a reflection on the different ways in which subjects relate to the gendered dynamics of cultural institutions as seen through the negotiation of associated physical spaces. What is revealed by this comparison are the complex ways in which subjects negotiate the physical space in which an institution manifests as a gendered arrangement. From 18th century native women diplomats, to Civil War female-assigned soldiers serving as men to late 20th century Chicana feminists negotiating a job-training center, women and woman-assigned subjects negotiated gender as they disputed the meanings of the physical spaces they occupied. Our panel juxtaposes three distinct, feminized subjects’ disputes over the meaning of different spaces to illuminate the ways in which their presence transformed those spaces.
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