FUN, SEX & CRYING OUT LOUD – 25th ANNIVERSARY CONFERENCE
March 14-16, 2025
St. Petersburg, Florida & Online
CFP – Deadline, Dec. 15
The Museum of Motherhood is calling all scholars, artists, and community
members for presentations and papers on the subject of ‘Fun, Sex, & Cryingt
Out Loud’. This year’s theme invites articles and art that support both the
interrogation and levity necessary to navigate turbulent times. As well, it
supports the subject matter elucidated in the Museum’s 2024-25 new ‘Escape
Womb Experience’ and the theme of conception, gestation, and birth.
Conference attendees will have the opportunity to experience this
one-of-a-kind exhibit.
This international call for papers invites artists, scholars, poets,
sociologists, maternal psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists,
women’s, sexuality, and gender studies professors, masculinity studies
experts, birth-workers, doctors, researchers, students, and lay-people to
share their work and tie it to this year’s theme. Works that are inclusive
of all identities of birthing folx are encouraged.
We encourage presenters to unpack the sociocultural domain of conception,
gestation, and birth and the nuanced and real experiences of all aspects of
the psychological, personal, professional, and media environment within
which these experiences are situated.
The conference will serve as a site of resistance and empowerment as we
deconstruct, reframe, and affirm the complex landscape of conception
(intended and unintended), gestation (in body and in other’s bodies), and
birth within the ongoing labor of diverse family systems everywhere. We
recognize the scale, variance, and duration of these passionate personal
and institutionalized experiences and hope that this conference will
contribute to the body of knowledge on this subject.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
- Reproductive language, ethics, and care
- Queer love, M/other love
- Normative constructions of gender in m/otherwork, pregnancy, and
birthing
- Biomedical and cultural discourses of conception, gestation, and birth
- Marginalized identities, fertility treatment, gender identity, and
intersex identities
- Un/wanted pregnancy in the context of pronatalism and
policy/criminalization
- Pregnancy and birthing with (dis-)abilities, illness, and children
with special needs
- Divorce, breaking up, un-coupling, and families with complex
identities and circumstances
- Bucking the trends and breaking new ground
- Art as healing, activism, and expression, and the importance of play
- Embodied resistance to socially constructed conventions about
motherwork, pregnancy, and birth, including as they are contextualized
within marginalized positions
- Language and identity
- Pain, spiritual awakening, birthing ourselves
CONFERENCE: The Annual Academic MoM Conference is in person and online in
2025. We welcome individuals and roundtables conducting research, making
art, working in therapeutic, medical, university, and birth settings, as
well as auto-ethnographic perspectives by m/others, family members, &
students. Submissions must include a title, bio, & abstract. Conference
applications are due December 15, 2024. These include all submission types
(e.g. performance, media, music).
TO SUBMIT: go to https://jourms.org/submit/. Questions can be emailed
directly to JourMS@gmail.com. Or call 877-711-MOMS (6667) leave a message.
All submissions may also be considered for publication in the Journal of
Mother Studies (JourMS.org) at presenter’s discretion. MOMmuseum.org St.
Pete, FL USA.
JOURNAL OF MOTHER STUDIES (JourMS): All submissions for the conference
should also consider submitting to the Journal of Mother Studies, an
academic, peer-reviewed, hybrid digital humanities journal devoted to
Mother Studies published annually. Final submissions for the Journal are
due by May 30th (midnight). JourMS <http://www.jourms.org/>
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