CFP: Boundaries of the Body; Literature on the Body; Not Your Mother's Feminism

All three of these listings are from https://webmail.iu.edu/horde/services/go.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcfp.english.upenn.edu

Reel Bodies:The Boundaries of the Body in Visual Cultures
A School of English Postgraduate Symposium
Newcastle University30th March 2007

Keynote Speaker:Andrew Shail (University of Oxford)
“Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at bestother beings encapsulated by skin?” (Donna Haraway).

Visual culture is traditionally associated with conventionally gendered,white, western models of health, youth, and beauty. This symposium willfocus on the areas where the representations of the body in film break with or subvert these dominant models, with a particular emphasis on four kinds of bodies: the Queer Body, the Posthuman Body, the Unnatural Body,and the Bisexual Body.Topics for discussion include but are not limited to:

• Ownership of Bodies
• Bodies in Cyberspace
• Gendered/Sexualised Bodies
• Hybrid Bodies
• Body Modification
• Body in Postmodernity
• Bad Taste and Bodies
• Corporeality/Intangibility
• Public/Private Body
• Genre and the Body
• Diseased Body
• The Grotesque Body

We welcome papers from current or recent postgraduates that engage withthe body in visual cultures. This symposium will provide a supportiveenvironment for presentation and discussion.Please send 250-300 word abstracts for 20 minute papers toreelbodies@ncl.ac.uk by 15 December 2006. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 15 January 2007, followed by a full programme for the symposiumon 1 February 2007.

Symposium Committee: Katherine Farrimond, Helen Fenwick, Fiona McNally & Bob Stoate (University of Newcastle)

Helen Fenwick
Doctoral Candidate
School of English
Percy Building
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon TyneNE1 7RU.

LITERATURE ON THE BODY
PCA/ACA national conference organizers have indicated a strong interest in my proposed panel, titled "The Story on the Body: Textual Tattoos and the Corporeal Canvas".

Panel Description:
Whereas Melville's Queequeg is one of American literature's earliest fictional tattooed characters, it is Hawthorne's Hester who upends one of the conventions of the body in literature: Her scarlet "A" reminds us of the role of her body in the novel, but it is the adulterous story told on her body that positions Hester herself as a text to be read.This panel focuses not on the human form in literature, but on literature inscribed upon the human form. Papers should address such questions as: How does the body--a sexed and gendered object--in turn "gender" its words? How does text rewrite the body? For whom do we write when we write on and with our bodies?

Possible paper topics include:
> Textual tattoos> Engraved or lettered jewelry
> Buttons, badges, and patches
> Wearable technology (ex. the scrolling marquis LED belt buckle)
> Literature on clothing
> Representations of body-as-written-text (ex. Greenaway's *Pillow Book,* Shelley Jackson's *Skin,* Hawthorne's *Scarlet Letter*)

Please send a brief abstract (250 words) and a note about your
field and institutional affiliation by November 17, 2006. Email
submissions and inquiries to Molly at this address:

For more information on the conference, see http:// www.popularculture.org

Not Your Mother's Feminism

Seeking contributors for a collection on feminist generations, tentatively entitled, “Not Your Mother’s Feminism.” I am specifically interested in hearing from those women who feel under represented within the struggle(s) for definitional control over the terms of feminist debate taking place in both academic and popular discourse. Contributors will likely be women who are too young to be Second Wave, too old to be Third Wave, and perhaps too theoretically (and academically) oriented to feel entirely “post-feminist.”

The collection will aim for an audience both academic and popular and will explore how generational representations of feminism/feminists in both venues have influenced—enhanced? augmented? ruined?—discussions of the women’s movement. For example, Third Wave feminists often argue that the work of the Second Wave is done and that women’s sexuality is the natural next ideological frontier. Such pronouncements have given rise to sub-categories of feminist scholarship/ideology labeled, for example, “sex-positive,” “girlie-,” and “lipstick”-feminism. This collection will consider the implications of generational developments like these and ask, among other questions, whether an evolution into sexual politics constitutes an historical or generational inevitability.

The collection will also consider other questions, like:

Are there women trained in feminism as yet unheard from?
Where are the scholars/activists who do not fit the historical parentheses between First and Second, or Second and Third and who do not appear in—or trace their political roots to—collections like to be real, Listen Up!, Manifesta, or Catching a Wave? And what does their feminism look like?
Must feminism embrace the generational metaphor? Has the metaphor served a purpose, perhaps momentarily, and run its course?
How might we explain the changes, developments in feminist thinking without notions of historical linearity and generational conflict?

Of course, this list is representative, not proscriptive. The editor seeks essays addressing these and any other questions concerning contemporary feminist politics and the manner(s) in which the movement and its terms are defined.

Seeking abstracts by 15 January; will request complete essays at later date. Please send abstracts through email: bean@marshall.edu, or through regular mail: Kellie Bean, English Department, One John Marshall Way, Huntington, WV, 25755. Feel free to email inquiries.

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.” Rebecca West