Wednesday, February 06, 2013

CFP: Our Conference is Dead! Long Live Other Conferences!


As a follow-up to yesterday's post about the cancellation of this year's IASPR conference, here are details of the
  • Midwest Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference (October 11-13, 2013)
  • Pleasure, Pain & Perversion: Embodied Violence & Eroticism in Cultural Representations (April 12-13, 2013), Fifth Annual Cultural Studies Graduate Student Conference and Workshop at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
  • Third Annual Gender and Sexuality Postgraduate Research Conference, Birmingham, UK (May 10, 2013)

2013 Midwest Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference
Call for Papers: Popular Romance

Friday-Sunday, October 11-13, 2013
St. Louis, MO
St. Louis Union Station Hotel
(Conference info: http://www.mpcaaca.org)

Deadline for submission: April 30, 2013.

The most prevalent narrative structure of popular romance is an integral element of any story, regardless of forum: film, television, fiction, manga, advertising. Not only is romance exceptionally popular, it is so pervasive as to become ordinary and overlooked. As the popularity of romance increases, so too does the need for serious scholarship of the genre in all its incarnations. We are interested in any and all topics about or related to popular romance and its representations in popular culture (fiction, stage, screen—large or small, commercial, advertising, music, song, dance, online, real life, etc.)

Proposals may be for individual papers or 3-person panels.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:
•       critical approaches, such as readings informed by critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial studies, or empirical science
•       depictions in the media and popular culture (e.g., film, television, literature, comics)
•       literature and fiction (genre romance, poetry, animé)
•       types of relationships (marriage, gay and lesbian)
•       historical practices and traditions of and in romance
•       regional and geographic pressures and influences (southern, Caribbean)
•       material culture (valentines, foods, fashions)
•       folklore and mythologies
•       jokes and humor
•       romantic love in political discourse (capitalism)
•       psychological approaches toward romantic attraction
•       emotional and sexual desire
•       subcultures: age (seniors, adolescents), multi-ethnic, inter-racial
•       individual creative producers or texts of popular romance
•       gender-bending and gender-crossing

Submit a one-page (200-250 words) proposal or abstract by 30 April 2013 to the Popular Romance area on the MPCA/ACA website http://submissions.mpcaaca.org. Please include name, affiliation, and e-mail address with your abstract. Also, please indicate in your submission whether your presentation will require a TV and DVD player. Note that LCD projectors will not be provided by MPCA/ACA.
More conference information can be found at http://www.mpcaaca.org/.
For further inquiries or concerns, please contact Romance Area Chair, Maryan Wherry, Western Illinois University Quad-Cities, m-wherry@wiu.edu.



Pleasure, Pain & Perversion: Embodied Violence & Eroticism in Cultural Representations
Fifth Annual Cultural Studies Graduate Student Conference and Workshop at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
April 12-13, 2013

Key note lecture to be delivered by: Dr. Liz Constable, UC Davis

The body serves as an important point of intersection, a site where ideology, material cultural practice, and narrative come together to form an understanding of the self. “Embodied Violence & Eroticism” asks us to explore this site in the various ways the body acts and is acted upon, demanding that we go beyond mere linear abstractions of ideology and look at how these ideologies converge upon the individual. Power relations use eroticism and violence as discourse to highlight the dichotomies between masculine and feminine, public and private spheres, colonizer and colonized, the body’s function and representation, and other binary relations. The complexity of erotic discourses lies in the manifold ways in which they encapsulate and transport desires, thereby blurring the boundaries between the acknowledgement of the self and the acknowledgement of the self’s desire.
Possible session topics include but are not limited to:

• Pornography, Power, and the Performance of the Erotic
• Performance and the Embodiment of Culture
• Biopolitics and Sexuality
• The Psychosomatic
• The (Trans)gendered Body
• Violation and Forgiveness: Living Through Trauma
• Post-colonialism, the Racialized Body, and Psychic Colonization
• Wars and Embodied Borders
• Sartorial Rhetoric and Semiotics
• The Cinematic/Virtual Body
• Taboo: Sex, Identity, Nudity and Erotic Subjectivity
• Psychoanalysis and Perversions
• Semiotics of Desire
• Erotic Justice
• The Erotic in Feminism/The Erotic in Feminine vis-à-vis Masculine Discourse
• Morality, Lust, and the Semiotics of Desire
• Fetishism and Popular Culture

Conference Structure: This conference/workshop will be comprised of the keynote address and panels on Friday, followed by additional panels on Saturday. Central to the conference is a graduate seminar style workshop on Saturday. This workshop is led by the keynote speaker and designed to explore the issues presented and discussed in more detail and depth. Presenters are requested to arrange their travel so that they can participate in the entire event, including the workshop. There will also be a closing reception Saturday evening, which is open to all participants and audience members.

Please send a 500 word abstract along with a brief biographical statement, in a separate document, to csconference.unm@gmail.com by Thursday, February 14. Selected participants will be notified by Monday, February 25. You can also visit our webpage (coming soon) for additional information about the conference: http://www.unm.edu/~fll/grad-conference.htm (check for updates).

In the meantime, the cfp can be seen here.


Third Annual Gender and Sexuality Postgraduate Research Conference
Birmingham, UK
May 10 2013

Key Note Speaker: Dr. Nadine Muller

This one-day interdisciplinary conference offers postgraduates the opportunity to present their research in a friendly and supportive environment. We invite applications for twenty-minute papers from researchers working within the fields of gender and sexuality studies. Suggestions for presentations may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

- social policy, government legislation, and matters of the law
- cultural products: film / music / art / TV / literature
- media, representation, and social images
- sexuality, otherness, erotic practice
- the body: subject, object, identity
- theory, methodology, practice
- feminism and postfeminism: representation and invisibility
- queer and trans*: changing images of femininity and masculinity

Please send an abstract, including a short bio, of no more than 300 words to g.roles@hotmail.com by 10th March 2013.

Roles is an interdisciplinary research forum hosted by researchers at the University of Birmingham for the purpose of fostering discussion and debate. We hold regular seminars as well as our annual conference. For more details see the Roles website.

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