Converging Narratives: Besieged and Transgressive Bodies March 31 and April 1, 2017 Chicago, IL
Keynote Speakers: Emily Esperanza, Video Artist and Director. Prof. Mimi Thi Nguyen, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The interdisciplinary graduate student conference, “Converging Narratives: Besieged and Transgressive Bodies,” will focus on the motif of the body, bodily experiences, and representations of the politicized body in literature and visual arts. Regardless of how they are conceived – as suffering flesh and psyche or embodied subjectivities and collectives – bodies remain the locus and subjects of theory, action, affect, and art. In the context of our technological age, it seems that bodies should be brought together and yet fissures in this rapprochement are continuously revealed. This affects considerations of how bodies of all types are represented, theorized, studied, and transformed in a period of transition. It is necessary to ask the intellectual community: where do gender and ideology intersect when we speak of ‘the body’? How do visual artists represent the complexities of the embodied self? Or, how can writers, performers, or musicians do so? How does the idea of the ‘taboo’ impact self-perception? How can this taboo be articulated within the arts? How is sexual identity articulated by and in the body or in the arts? What happens when the ‘body’ conflicts with the ‘mind’? How do (consensual or non-consensual) body modifications silence the body, or allow it to ‘talk’? And how might we revive the centrality of the body within the “body politic” in an age defined by the virtual? While all proposals on the topic are welcome, we will organize panels employing diverse tools to investigate:
Binary conception of body and mind/ thought
Gendered and racialized bodies
(Dis)abled bodies
Trans experience and its representation
Decaying older bodies, perceptions of them
Limits of the body
Objectification of the body
Conceptions of bodies and communities
Body and identity
The space of the body: migration and frontier
Spatial relations among bodies and alternative understandings of space
Masculinities and femininities in the age of the posthuman
Cyborgs, androids and humanoids: bodies and technology
Embodiment and the text: writing the flesh
Desire, erotica and pornography: bodies to transgress
The body of politics, the politics of the body
Biopolitics and biopower
Instead of traditional panels, this conference will be held in the form of workshops; papers will be distributed beforehand, and instead of reading the paper, we will give an overview and discuss our research together based on the topic of the panel. We strongly encourage proposals submitted by graduate students from all disciplines including, but not limited to, any field in the Literary Studies, Sociology, Film Studies, Art and Architecture, Gender and Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, and History. We also welcome dance, theatrical, literary, and cinematic contributions. Please submit a mini vita (no longer than 50 words) and an abstract (no longer than 300 words) for a 15 minute presentation to [email protected]no later than January 30, 2017. Pre-constituted panels of 3 or 4 papers are also welcome.