45th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) April 3-6, 2014
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Host: Susquehanna University

This panel will explore the relationships between space and place and the ways French heritage women rethink place as a potential for personal and social creation, for transformation and connection. Some themes to consider: how is the virtual site of the page a place where narrator and reader connect? How do old memories and new geographical place interact and connect? How do urban environment, nature, gender, sexuality or class affect the reconfiguring of place? Send 200/300w abstracts in English or French to Carole Salmon Carole_Salmon@uml.edu and Anna Rocca arocca@salemstate.edu

Deadline: September 30, 2013
Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=204690

Spaces, whether domestic, social, or political, often carry symbolic or metonymic meaning. As Nicole Pohl points out in Women, Space and Utopia 1600-1800, there is a “complex linkage between space, knowledge and power, identity and the body” (1). However, the occupants of a space can transform, alter, or redefine its significance. In early modern England, women employed a number of strategies to question, defy, and change the traditional authoritative and often oppressive spaces in their world/lives. For example, by forming bonds with other inhabitants of the prison, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria undermines the punishing isolation of the jail cell and converts it into a communal space defined by equality. By placing her body on display in a sustained trance Anna Trapnel transforms an inn into a sight of political protest calling into question Cromwell’s authority in England. This panel seeks to examine the multitude of strategies early modern women used to redefine spaces associated with or symbolic of, power and oppression. Spectacle, physical suffering, literacy, travel, and community are some of the tactics women used to accomplish the transformations that this panel aims to explore. By investigating the ways in which women represent their alterations of these spaces we will also address the essential question, once ruptured, what emerges? How do women modify, resist, usurp and/or escape the spaces that bind them? What do these women accomplish? Please send 300 word abstracts and a brief curriculum vita to Andrea Fabrizio or Ruth Garcia: at FabrizioGarciaabstracts@gmail.com

Deadline: September 30, 2013
Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

45th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
April 3-6, 2014
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Host: Susquehanna University

The 2014 NeMLA convention continues the Association’s tradition of sharing innovative scholarship in an engaging and generative location. This capitol city set on the Susquehanna River is known for its vibrant restaurant scene, historical sites, the National Civil War museum, and nearby Amish Country, antique shops and Hershey Park. NeMLA has arranged low hotel rates of $104–$124.

The 2014 event will include guest speakers, literary readings, professional events, and workshops. A reading by George Saunders will open the Convention. His 2013 collection of short fiction, The Tenth of December, has been acclaimed by the New York Times as: “the best book you’ll read this year.” NeMLA’s Keynote Speaker will be David Staller, Producer and Director of Project Shaw. Mr. Staller presents monthly script-in-hand performances of Bernard Shaw’s plays at the Players Club in New York City.

Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however, panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable. http://www.nemla.org/convention/2014/cfp.html

The nineteenth century was an era that changed the way people experienced time on both sides of the Atlantic. New modes of transportation such as the railroad and the steam engine shortened the time spent traveling across long distances, while new forms of communication such as the telephone and the transatlantic cable promoted faster and more reliable transatlantic exchange. As time speeds up, distances shrink—enabling new opportunities and disabling old ones for both men and women. The fast tempo of factory work and groups such as the “Ten Hours Movement” fixed new importance on the relation between a man’s work and his time, while debates about “redundant women” were based on the threat posed by a large number of women who, according to Florence Nightingale, had nothing to do with their time. On the other hand, the scientific theories of Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, Herbert Spencer, and John Fiske complicated the understanding of temporality by emphasizing the experience of “deep” geological time and “natural” evolutionary patterns.

This panel questions how changes in temporal experience influenced the perception of race, gender and class in 19th-cent. British and American contexts, especially with regard to theories of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, and the genres of realism and naturalism. We are interested in papers that open the geography of transatlantic studies to a discussion of time across literary, political, and scientific contexts. Please send a 300-word abstract and a bio to Jacob Jewusiak (jmjewusiak@valdosta.edu) and Myrto Drizou (mdrizou@gmail.com).

45th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
April 3-6, 2014
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Host: Susquehanna University

Deadline: September 30, 2013
Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

Eco-feminist Readings of 19th-Century American Women’s Fiction

Eco-feminism focuses on depictions of the natural world which help to illuminate ‘the oppression, subordination, or domination of women,’ revealing associations between the ‘unjustified domination of women [. . .] and of non-human nature’ (Warren 1-2). The domestic sphere of the nineteenth century necessarily included interactions with animals and the natural world, and women writing in nineteenth-century America were often uniquely situated to examine human relations with non-human nature from a different vantage point than those that centered on a more traditional patriarchal perspective. Annette Kolodny has written extensively about the process by which male writers gender the landscapes they survey as female in order to justify conquest, a construct which also reinforces the domination and oppression of women. Even into the nineteenth century, as westward expansion continued and urbanization increased, the male gaze surveyed and appropriated the female landscape and its resources. How do women writing in the 19th-century represent the environments in which they live? How do they characterize their relationships with nature, if not as conquerors or explorers? And how might such relations with non-human life forms reflect strategies of empowerment, or alternatives to patriarchal society? This panel would like to explore eco-feminist readings of 19th-century fiction — texts which illuminate some aspect of the parallel domination of women and non-human nature and/or that challenge these oppressive constructs.

Please submit 1-page abstracts to Jane Rosecrans at jrosecrans@reynolds.edu

Deadline: September 30, 2013
Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=204232

45th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
April 3-6, 2014
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Host: Susquehanna University

Panel: Women Writing War Trauma

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” Theodor Adorno famously pronounced in 1949, indicating, among other things, that the Holocaust presents a radical problem of representation. Indeed, the paradox at the heart of Trauma Theory is that traumatic experience both demands a story and defies communicability; it is the unspeakable that nevertheless has to be told. And in the past decade or so, scholars have begun to investigate how gender factors into this problem, a problem that extends to trauma literature in general. Thus the testimonials by female survivors of the Holocaust are gaining considerable attention, while memoirs by female soldiers of Iraq and Afghanistan bear witness to the trauma of a combat experience made all the more catastrophic by institutionalized sexual persecution.

This panel seeks to investigate how gender affects not only the traumatic experience itself, but also the narration of traumatic experience, by women writing about war. The “writing” may take the form of memoir, fiction, poetry, film, or other, more experimental modes of narration, such as blogging. The goal of this panel is to bring together a diverse range of material and perspectives that will move the discussion of gender and trauma beyond a simple comparison of men’s and women’s trauma, and into the gendered politics of writing itself.

Please send 300-500 word abstracts and brief biographical statements to Jenny Kijowski, profkijowski@gmail.com

Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=203809

The Journal of Feminist Scholarship is a twice-yearly, peer-reviewed, open-access journal published online and aimed at promoting feminist scholarship across the disciplines, as well as expanding the reach and definitions of feminist research. The journal can be found at http://www.jfsonline.org/.

The editors of JFS invite submissions on a rolling basis (for more information, please see the “Submissions” page on our website). The average time from submission to publication for accepted manuscripts has been less than a year, and our current acceptance rate stands at thirty five percent.

Issues 1-4 (Fall 2011 to Spring 2013) of JFS are now available for open-access reading and downloading. Issue 5 (Fall 2013) is in preparation. We invite you to visit our site, explore the journal’s contents, and consider submitting your research to the forum that allows for sharing it freely with the worldwide community of feminist scholars and activists while maintaining rigorous reviewing and editorial standards.
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=205130

Tuesday 8 April 2014, University College London

With a keynote address by Professor Laura Doan, University of Manchester

CALL FOR PAPERS

This one day workshop looks to bring together scholars, at any stage of their career and working on any aspect of gender, sex and sexuality in 20th century Britain, and to provide a forum for both the presentation of new work and the beginning of a dialogue about the past, present and future of the field.

The workshop addresses the field at a critical juncture in its development. The decades since the publication of Jeffrey Weeks’ Sex, politics and society (1981) have seen histories of gender, sex and sexuality become increasingly central to historians’ understanding of 20th century Britain. There has been a corresponding march through the institutions: no longer regarded as involved in a fringe pursuit, scholars of gender, sex and sexuality have found homes in departments; non-specialist periodicals have watched and sponsored new research with interest; and the UK’s major presses have published groundbreaking work, exemplified by the inauguration of Palgrave Macmillan’s ‘Gender and Sexualities in History’ series in 2009.

Alongside this professional maturation, events in wider society have demonstrated the continued power of ideas about gender, sex and sexuality to shape popular understandings of British history. Indeed, the recent past, whether as a dark age of intolerance or, conversely, a golden age of “family values,” has loomed heavily in debates about equal marriage, the Savile affair and the “sexualisation” of childhood. The voices of historians have been present in some of these debates. Yet in others they have been largely absent, even when scholars from other disciplines – sociology, education, gender studies, science and medicine – have been prominent.

The workshop therefore asks participants to consider “where have we got to, and where do we go from here?” What contributions have we made, through British examples, to understandings of gender, sex and sexuality in history? What contributions have we made, through a focus on of gender, sex and sexuality, to understandings of 20th century British history? Finally, what contributions have we made to understandings of gender, sex and sexuality in Britain outside our profession, both in other disciplines and, importantly, the wider public conversation? And in all three cases, what contributions, in new and ongoing work, might we make in the future?

To help address these questions, the workshop organisers welcome proposals for papers presenting new work on any aspect of gender, sex or sexuality in twentieth century British history as well as those that reflexively engage with the past, present or future of the field. The organisers particularly welcome papers looking at non-marginal experiences, as well as those looking to challenge marginal/non-marginal distinctions altogether. We are also especially interested in contributions from postgraduate and early career scholars.

If you are interested in presenting a paper at the workshop, please email a short proposal (max. 300 words) and CV or short bio to newdirections2014@gmail.com by 1st September 2013.

If you would like to discuss possible topics before submitting a proposal, please get in touch at the same address. Registration details for non-speakers will be publicised later in 2013 at http://newdirections2014.wordpress.com/

Kevin Guyan and Ben Mechen, UCL History (organisers)
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=204877

Feral Feminisms, a new independent, inter-media, peer reviewed, open access online journal, invites submissions from artists, activists, scholars and graduate students for a special issue entitled, “Feminist Un/Pleasure: Reflections on Perversity, BDSM, and Desire,” guest edited by Toby Wiggins. Submitted contributions may include full-length academic essays (about 5000 – 7000 words), shorter creative pieces, cultural commentaries, or personal narratives (about 500 – 2500 words), poetry, photo-essays, short films/video (uploaded to Vimeo), visual and sound art (jpeg Max 1MB), or a combination of these. Please direct inquiries and submissions to Guest Editor, Toby Wiggins (wiggins.yorku@gmail.com).

Courtesy Co.Design, http://www.fastcodesign.com/

What gets you off? Desire is a slippery concept, difficult to hold or describe, and certainly not consistent or interchangeable. An insatiable yearning for some is for others abhorrent and deserving of reprimand. The social complexities of perversion are therefore always in flux, influencing diverse manifestations of sexuality and its censorship. According to Freud’s early formulations on the two principles of psychic functioning, and later developed in his writings on the death drive, pleasure and unpleasure are intimately bound. Our primary drive encompasses both the unpleasure of an increase in excitation and the pleasure of its release. In other words, an individual’s relationship to unencumbered indulgence continually grapples with its denial. This fundamental tension also resonates beyond psychoanalysis, in feminist genealogies, as an ambivalence towards BDSM and “perverse” sexualities. Echoed in Carole Vance’s influential anthology, Pleasure and Danger, and the ongoing battles of the sex wars, feminist sexuality encompasses both enjoyment and suffering wrapped tightly around the politics of desire. This apparent contradiction of painful enjoyment also weaves throughout BDSM sexuality itself, where the lines between violence, sex, and love begin to blur.

This special issue of Feral Feminisms aims to complicate, untame, queer and radicalize tumultuous legacies of pleasure and unpleasure by reflecting upon the current intersections of feminist desire and BDSM sexuality. Topics of inquiry may include, but are not limited to:

● pleasure and pain in feminist sexualities

● resonances of canonical sexologists such as Richard von Kraft Ebbing on contemporary perverse sexualities

● the instability of sexual subcultures vs mainstream

● gender and power play

● representations of perverse feminist sexuality in film, literature, and art

● Fifty Shades of Grey and histories of erotic fiction

● psychoanalytic theories of BDSM and/or perversion

● affect and kinky feminist desire

● sex work and professional dominatrices

● critical interrogations into the construction of subversive sexualities

● masochism, sadism, fetishism

● the politicization of BDSM

● death, the death drive, and queer sexualities

● addressing white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, colonialism, heteronormativity, and/or patriarchy through scenes of perversion
● limit experience

● BDSM sexuality as performance

Submission guidelines:

Articles, no longer than 7,000 words, should be prepared for anonymous peer-review. Please include a separate document with the contributor’s name and email, affiliated school (if applicable), a 100-word abstract, and a 60-word biography. All references should be in MLA citation style. For written submissions: 1 inch (2.54 cm) margins. Times New Roman 12pt. Double spaced. Include page number in header. Bold headings.

We also welcome the submission of shorter creative pieces, cultural commentaries, or personal narratives between 500-2500 words, poems, colour or black & white images, and films, or a combination of mediums. Written submissions should be in Microsoft Word format. Image submissions should be in jpeg, with a maximum file size of 1MB. Film submissions should be uploaded to Vimeo with a link to the film provided in the submission email; if you are submitting a film or multimedia piece and do not wish to upload to Vimeo, we are open to establishing other means of submission – please contact the Guest Editor (email provided above). All art and non-text based submissions should be accompanied by a paragraph length artist statement that outlines the goals of the work and how it engages with the CFP.

All submissions are subject to double-anonymous peer review, are reviewed by 2-3 peer reviewers, and receive collegial feedback on their work.

Previously published articles will not be considered without the permission of the editors. Do not simultaneously offer your article to another publication. The author(s) always retain copyright of their work. The author(s) may republish provided they request permission from the Managing Editors and they agree to acknowledge that it appeared in Feral Feminisms.

These submission guidelines can also be found at www.feralfeminisms.com

Email submissions to: Toby Wiggins (wiggins.yorku@gmail.com)