There's a conference in planning for 2013 about the connections between material goods from the Middle Ages and Gender. Now that's an interesting topic!
From their
website with info about the conference:
The Conference will consider the gendered nature of social, religious and economic uses of ‘things’, exploring the way that objects and material culture were produced, consumed and displayed. Papers will address questions of gender from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, embracing literature, history, art history, and archaeology.
Themes will include:
• adornment, clothing and self-fashioning
• the material culture of devotion
• objects and materialism
• the material culture of children, adolescents and life cycle
• emotion, intimacy and love-gifts
• entertainment and games
• memory and commemoration
• pleasure, pain, and bodily discipline
• production and consumption
• monastic material culture
• material culture in literary texts
The CfP is open until September 14, and the conference takes place in January 4-6, 2013, in Bath.