thank you & democracy conference

Dear Debbie, U of I grad students, and IU grad students,
As we head into finals, I just want to thank all of you for sharing this blog. This was my first and--although it wasn't as active as I thought it might be--I enjoyed sharing ideas, images, and discussions across cyberspace. I've been told by many a lurker that they wish they could have posted because they have enjoyed our discussions (--and thank you to everyone who has shared feedback). I also have been told by a senior colleague that he and another colleague at Northwestern are thinking of doing a joint blog this spring for their seminars as a result of this idea. So, hopefully, beyond helping us re-imagine and re-articulate body rhetorics and rhetorics of the body, this blog will help foster more cross-university discussions in the future.

I'm looking forward to catching up with many of you in January. In case the word isn't out, the 2007 second annual IU/UofI invitation-only Colloquium will be Sat., Jan. 13, at Indiana University, focusing on democracy. The very, very, unofficial and definitely subject to change schedule might look something like this:
10:30-12:00--Opening faculty panel "Democracy and ..."; featuring Ron Greene, Barb Biesecker, Bob Hariman, & John Lucaites
12-1--Catered lunch and discussion about the "Democracy and ..." panel
1-2--Four simultaneous faculty panels related to the theme "Democracy and ..."
DEMOCRACY AND THE BODY: Hosted by Debbie Hawhee, Phaedra Pezzullo, and Jeff Bennett
DEMOCRACY AND MEDIA/AESTHETICS: Hosted by Michael Kaplan, Jon Simons, Bruce Gronbeck, and more
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL CHANGE: Hosted by Bob Ivie, Robert Terrill, Ned O'Gorman and more
DEMOCRACY AND CULTURAL STUDIES: James Hay, Ted Striphas, and Gil Rodman
2:30-6:30--Student workshops.
6:30--Potluck hosted by IU students at the home of Phaedra Pezzullo and Ted Striphas
Whatever the final schedule is, many faculty and many more graduate students are committed to what promises to be a great day of discussion. Last year was much smaller and that's how Debbie and I first met; so, clearly, this is a very smart and much-desired graduate student-led initiative;)

Thanks again to everyone for this semester,
Phaedra.

Pregnancy and Birth on Film

Please come to Underground's Experimental Film Series December 1st program on Women and Childbearing Choices Night. The three films deal with the pregnant, birthing, and maternal body. This series is hosted by the Department of Communication and Culture.

December 1: Women and Childbearing Choices Night

Radio/Television Building, Room 251, Friday at 7:00 PM.

Tonight we have three films dealing with birth, the choice to bear, and the challenges of parenthood. Claudia Weill’s and Joyce Chopra’s Joyce at 34 (1975, 28 min.) follows Chopra’s first year of motherhood as she juggles the conflicting demands of infant, husband, and career. Marjorie Keller’s Misconception (1977, 42 min.) is composed of six parts that together chronicle the experience of one woman and her husband during the course of her natural childbirth. Its structure lends the film a rhythm that has less to do with traditional documentary or film journalism than with the pacing of poetry. Mother Load (1994, 15 min.), by Betsy Weiss, offers an alternative approach to the traditional documentary and combines live action with stock footage to illuminate the irony implicit in the life choices women today must face when considering whether or not to bear life.

Underground Experimental Film Series
Department of Communication and Culture
Indiana University
http://www.indiana.edu/~uground/

Woman kicked off plane for breastfeeding!

...from MomsRising.org...

Can you believe a woman was recently kicked off a Delta Airlines flight for discreetly breastfeeding her child!?

Here's an article on it: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15720339/?from=ET

*SIGN THE PETITION TO SUPPORT BREASTFEEDING: http://www.momsrising.org/breastfeeding-petition

Join me in telling Delta Airlines to get a clue and be supportive of breastfeeding mothers; and also in telling Congress it's time to pass the Breastfeeding Promotion Act, which amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect breastfeeding mothers. Clearly this law is needed now!

And, I hope you'll also join me and tens of thousands of others in one of the most exciting grassroots movement on the Internet: MomsRising.org.

SIGN ON WITH MOMSRISING AT: http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/momsrising/signUp.jsp?key=1682&t=longsignup.dwt

MomsRising.org (http://www.momsrising.org) is working to build a massive grassroots movement big enough to impact the outcome of the 2008 elections and beyond. The time has come to break the logjam that's been holding back family-friendly legislation for decades. It's going to take all of us--and then some--working together to get there.

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

CFP: Body Politics in the Americas

The Hemispheric Institute and the Centro Cultural Recoleta are pleased to announce the upcoming

6th Encuentro
Corpolíticas / Body Politics in the Americas:
Formations of Race, Class and Gender
at the Centro Cultural Recoleta and the Teatro Empire
with the collaboration of Instituto Torcuato Di Tella
June 8-17, 2007
in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Encuentro 2007 Online Call and Application Form:
http://hemisphericinstitute.org/eng/seminar/2007/
Application Deadline: 15 December 2006

Our upcoming Encuentro in Buenos Aires will focus on body politics: the politics of the body, political bodies, bodies politic, and the relations between them. We are particularly interested in the formations of race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender articulated through body politics in different eras, geographies and imaginaries in the Americas. We understand the body as a site of negotiation, discipline, and a means of expression and meaning. These issues will be clustered under four large umbrella topics that will be the point of departure for a range of performances, installations, exhibitions, roundtable discussions, workshops, lectures, and work groups: 1) Corpografías: bodies and the making of place (how have the politics of the body been enlisted in the production of political bodies?), 2) Corpodinamias: bodies and movement(s) (how does attention to the performing body help us understand political movements, the staging of power, the body politics of migration?), 3) Corpusterrorificus: bodies and terror (how can we understand the production of terror and the ways in which it produces terrifying/terrified, fearful/fearless bodies?), and 4) Corpoéticas: poetics and politics (what is the relation between aesthetic and ethical performance; what practices, theories, or models allow us to explore the politics and poetics of the body?). We invite a range of proposals, both individual and collective, that focus on issues that are contemporary and historical, local and translocal.

We invite artists, performers, academics and activists to propose performances, papers, performance-based scholarship (scholarship that attempts to enact what it describes), videos, installations, visual art exhibits, work group topics, activist projects, hacktivist or virtual actions, and other forms that bring together performance and politics in the Americas to participate in our upcoming Encuentro.

We are seeking groups or solo artists (theater / music / dance / installation / performance art / etc.) for all areas of our performance program, for both indoor and outdoor spaces: Feature-length (2 hours or less), Short (30 minutes or less), and Cabaret/Bar interventions ("after-hours"). We're calling for a wide range of performances, from traditional representations to hybrid and contestatory practices.

In terms of visual arts, this year we have wonderful spaces for exhibits and installations at the Centro Cultural Recoleta, which is a prime venue for modern arts in Buenos Aires. The Centro also has a small movie theater, which will give us the opportunity to screen films and videos by filmmakers throughout the event. These film and exhibit spaces will be open to the public, so we encourage artists to submit proposals to present their work during the Encuentro.

We are also calling for Work Group papers/projects related to the theme of Corpolíticas/Body Politics in the Americas: Performing Race, Class and Gender. Papers/Projects should be a maximum of 8-10 pages in length and must relate to the Encuentro's Work Group topics. Projects may include descriptions of artists'/activists' work. Successful applicants will receive acceptance letters by the end of January, and will appear in the official Encuentro program.

Participants will be chosen by application . Please go to the Online Encuentro Call to find out more details and to apply through our web form.

Application Deadline: 15 December 2006

From Human to Billboard

Are people familiar with Dove's 'campaign for real beauty' project?

http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/home_films_evolution_v2.swf

(Dove's Evolution commercial by Reginald Pike's Yael Staav and Ogilvy's Tim Piper, 60 seconds)

Victimless Leather Jacket

Wow! Shira's post on the "body bread" reminded me of an art project I encountered a year or so ago. Produced by the Tissue Culture & Art Project, the little tan colored blob in the round-bottom lab flask is a "victimless leather jacket." They have grown a layer of immortalized cell lines on top of a polymer matrix (to give it a fetching jacket shape). The layer of tissue is alive. Their intent is not to create a new kind of leather for us to make adorable little bags and shoes out of - rather, the project creators want us to think about our use of flesh (specifically animal flesh) for consumer products and how we might exploit other living beings.

At the risk of sounding irreverent - I must admit - when I first saw this image, I thought it was a little piece of fried chicken!