CSGS Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University

Call for Papers: Thinking Gender 2011

Robert — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:49:44 +0000

UCLA CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WOMEN announces

Thinking Gender 2011

21st Annual Graduate Student Research Conference

Thinking Gender is a public conference highlighting graduate student research on women, gender and sexuality across all disciplines and historical periods. We invite submissions for individual papers or pre-constituted panels. This year, we especially welcome papers addressing women, gender and sexuality in relation to:

· Food (sustainability, food justice, marketing, disordered eating, food preparation)
· Money (the economy, microfinance, entrepreneurship, consumerism, the global marketplace, business practices)
· The Academy (innovative research methodologies, human subjects, power relations, epistemologies, the Archive)
· Invented Pathologies (menopause, PMS, female sexual dysfunction, the medicalization of sex).

For individual papers, please submit an abstract (250 words), a CV (2 pages maximum), and a brief bibliography (3-5 sources). For panels, please submit a 250-word description of the panel topic in addition to the materials required for the individual paper submissions. Please see the submission guidelines at http://www.csw.ucla.edu/thinkinggender.html.

Send submissions to: thinkinggender@csw.ucla.edu

Deadline for Submissions: October 22, 2010, by midnight

Conference is Friday, February 11, 2011, at the UCLA Faculty Center.

Event is free and open to the public, but there will be a $25 registration fee for presenters, to cover the cost of conference materials and lunch at the Faculty Center.

Parking is reserved at UCLA, Lot #2 for $10

UCLA Center for the Study of Women
Box 957222 / Public Policy 1400H
Los Angeles, CA 90095-7222
http://www.csw.ucla.edu

Affective Tendencies: Bodies, Pleasures, Sexualities conference

Robert — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 20:47:03 +0000

Affective Tendencies: Bodies, Pleasures, Sexualities

Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University
October 7-9, 2010

Deadline for Registration: September 15, 2010

This conference addresses the question of how sexuality, pleasure and bodies constitute, at least in part, affective life. Affective tendencies, orientations, trajectories have regulated how we understand and experience bodies, pleasures, sexualities. How are we to understand affective life? How are our conceptions of the body altered and complicated through understanding affective forces? Joy and sadness, as much as passion and desire, expand or contract our worlds, while they link bodies in particular styles of living in the world. How are relations of power – those that constitute relations of oppression, whether in terms of gender, race, class, nationality, religion or sexuality – to be understood following the ‘affective turn’? How is sexuality to be understood affectively? How is affect to be understood sexually? Are pleasures sexual? Are they always forms of joy?

Keynote Speakers

Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago.
Leo Bersani (Professor Emeritus of French, University of California, Berkeley)
David Eng (Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania)
Jasbir Puar (Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University)

Panels:

Race, Nation, Affect and Sexuality
A New Kind of Queerness?
Desiring Geographies
Sex and Violence / The Joys of Sex
Body Technologies

Speakers include:

Vigdis Broche-Due (University of Bergen, Norway)
Ed Cohen (Rutgers University)
Claire Colebrook (Penn State University)
Ulrika Dahl (Södertörn University College, Sweden)
Carlos Decena (Rutgers University)
Richard Dienst (Rutgers University)
Nicole Fleetwood (Rutgers University)
Jean Franco (Columbia University)
Marisa Fuentes (Rutgers University)
Mary Gossy (Rutgers University)
Allan Isaac (Rutgers University)
Ellen Mortensen (University of Bergen, Norway)
Kristin Sampson (University of Bergen, Norway)
Kyla Schuller (Rutgers University)
Jami Weinstein (Linköping University, Sweden)

Conference to be held in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Rutgers University, 162 Ryders Lane, New Brunswick NJ 08901.

Registration for the conference is on a first-come first-serve basis.

Please register online before September 15th at: http://womens-studies.rutgers.edu or email Suzy Kiefer at mkiefer@rci.rutgers.edu.

For further details contact Elizabeth Grosz egrosz@rci.rutgers.edu or Suzy Kiefer at mkiefer@rci.rutgers.edu

Call for papers: Violences and Silences

Robert — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 20:40:15 +0000

GEXcel, Gendering EXcellence – Centre of Gender Excellence welcomes you to the conference

Violences and Silences: Shaming, Blaming – and Intervening

October 12 – 14, 2010, Room Temcas, T-House, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

Supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council, Linköping University and Örebro University launched a 5 year project to establish a European Centre of Gender Excellence based in Sweden–Gendering Excellence (GEXcel): Towards a European Centre of Excellence in Transnational and Transdisciplinary Studies of Changing Gender Relations, Intersectionalities and Embodiment, directed by professor Nina Lykke. In 2010 the GEXcel program at Linköping university will run subtheme 7 Getting rid of violence.

Subtheme 7 is lead by professor Barbro Wijma, and it is organized as a part of Theme 7 & 8, Teaching Normcritical Sex – Getting Rid of Violence. TRANSdisciplinary, TRANSnational and TRANSformative Feminist Dialogues on Embodiment, Emotions and Ethics.

The conference Violences and Silences is a culminating event of subtheme 7. Here, the focus will be on violence as well as on intervention strategies. Through an exploration of the role of silences and silencing, shame and blaming for maintaining violence, the concept of “perpetrator” is expanded, and thus, extended possibilities for intervention can be identified and discussed. During the conference, key note addresses will be given by internationally reputed researchers and artists.

The conference is chaired by Professor Barbro Wijma, with keynote addresses from:

Susan Edwards, Professor of Law, University of Buckingham, UK

”The Aetiology of Women’s Silence in Violence – Lessons from the legal field”

Dubravka Zarkov, Associate Professor in Gender, Development and Conflict Studies, The International Institute of Social Studies, The Hauge

Ann Heberlein, Associate Professer in Etichs, University of Lund, Sweden

Ka Schmitz, Artist, illustrator and queer feminist activist, Berlin, Germany & Sandra Klauert, graduated social worker and queer feminist activist, Germany

“Getting in Touch – Comic and Activism”

Lotta Samelius, Dr, Psychology, the National Swedish Police Academy, Sweden, Christa Binswanger, Dr phil, Gender Studies, University of Basel, Switzerland & Suruchi Thapar-Björkert, Senior Lecturer, Dept. of Government, University of Uppsala, Sweden

“Turning points and the ‘Everyday’: Exploring Agency and Violence in Intimate Relationships”

Åsa Wettergren, Associate Professor in Sociology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

“The humiliation and shaming of helper interactions – how good intentions undermine agency”

Barbro Wijma, Professor of Gender and Medicine, University of Linköping, Sweden

Junior as well as senior scholars are invited to present papers in the conference workshop streams. Send an abstract of the proposed paper to coordinator@genderexcel.org of up to 250 words demonstrating how research connects to the theme of the conference. Please also include a brief biographical note of up to 150 words outlining your current research interests, most recent publications, academic affiliation and status. Deadline for submissions are 15 September. Those who are accepted to present a paper will be notified shortly thereafter.

The deadline for registration is 24 September. Register to participate by sending an e-mail to coordinator@genderexcel.org. The registration fee is 400 SEK (about 40 Euro), and includes the conference dinner, lunches and coffee. Those who are accepted to present papers will be exempted from the registration fee.

For updates about the conference, visit http://www.genderexcel.org/?q=node/277

PECANS Visiting Fellowships 2010-11

Robert — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 20:36:36 +0000

CentreLGS PECANS welcomes applications from early career scholars (postgraduate research students and academics up to 5 years post-PhD) wishing to visit either the CentreLGS at the University of Kent or the GSL research group at Keele University for a limited period of time (between 1 and 3 weeks and preferably between November and March) during the UK academic year of 2010-2011.

Applicants should be early career researchers with a strong interest in critical, interdisciplinary, theoretically engaged and policy relevant research relating to law, gender and sexuality (broadly defined).

Applications must be submitted to d.alessandrini@kent.ac.uk by 31 August 2010. The committee will make a decision by the 30 September 2010 and visits can take place from November 2010. Limited amounts of financial support are available to facilitate visits from outside the UK, and will be allocated on the basis of need.

More information about the Scheme is available on the PECANS website at http://www.clgs-pecans.org.uk/fellowships.php

Prior to submitting an application, prospective applicants are welcome to contact either Donatella Alessandrini (d.alessandrini@kent.ac.uk) or Rosie Harding (r.harding@law.keele.ac.uk) for informal advice on their proposed application. Further information about the research interests of CentreLGS members at both Keele and Kent can be found on the relevant departmental websites.

Please distribute widely and also remember to let new research students and new early career scholars in your institution know about PECANS.

PECANS: an international network of postgraduate and early career academics in Law, Gender and Sexuality.

Women & Power 2010: Our Time to Lead conference

Robert — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 20:41:17 +0000

Women & Power 2010: Our Time to Lead

September 24–26, 2010

Join hundreds of women for a weekend of celebration and conversation guaranteed to wake up your inner leader and leave you brimming with renewed purpose. Omega’s annual Women & Power conference is one of the most celebrated women’s gatherings in the world, unique in its rich diversity of speakers, performers, and participants.

Featuring Gail Collins, Ani DiFranco, Elizabeth Lesser, Sharon Salzberg, Jennifer Buffett, Mae Jemison, Zainab Salbi and more.

This year, the conference is a call-out to women of all ages and backgrounds to become the leaders we have been waiting for. Whether you are a professional, activist, volunteer, student, artist, mother, spiritual seeker, or social visionary, it is time to dig deep, retrieve your authentic voice and values, and lead with courage and heart—at home, work, and in the world.

Hope to see you there. Thank you for forwarding to your networks.

Omega is located at 150 Lake Drive, Rhinebeck, NY 12572-3252.

Framing the Vulva: Genital Cosmetic Surgery & Genital Diversity conference in Las Vegas

Robert — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 20:38:40 +0000

THE NEW VIEW CAMPAIGN announces its THIRD Conference, to be held at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on Sunday, September 26, 2010.

FRAMING THE VULVA: GENITAL COSMETIC SURGERY AND GENITAL DIVERSITY

While the vulva surgeons are holding a conference on the Las Vegas strip, the New View, in collaboration with the UNLV Women’s Studies Department and Petals, will hold a counter-symposium to examine the personal and political complexities of the new female genital cosmetic surgeries.

Our one-day conference will include a morning plenary session on the emerging issues in genital scholarship, activism, and art, and an afternoon of experiential and discussion workshops for participants to share strategies and build connections. The event will conclude with an evening reception, photography and craft exhibition, and film showing at the Erotic Heritage Museum.

Areas covered will include:

• Cosmetogynecology and the new genital perfectability industries
• The rhetoric vs. the realities of Western genital surgeries vs. “FGM”
• Collaborative models of activism
• The revival of “cunt art” in craft, film, photography and painting
• Sex education and the challenges of body anxiety
• The latest body modification trends, from Vajazzling to Vatooing
• Disease-mongering, marketing, and body surveillance
• Critical health studies perspectives on cosmetic genital surgery

Confirmed plenary speakers include:

• Virginia Braun, University of Auckland, New Zealand
• Leonore Tiefer, NYU Medical School, NYC
• Vanessa Schick, Indiana University, Bloomington
• Lynn Comella, UNLV, Las Vegas
————————————
Leonore Tiefer, PhD
ltiefer@mindspring.com
212-533-2774

The Politics and Poetics of Refugees

Robert — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:54:53 +0000

An Interdisciplinary Symposium at New York University

September 23 to 25, Thursday to Saturday
times to be announced

Keynote lecture by Thomas Keenan

Other participants include Eliot Borenstein, David Campbell, Ilana Feldman, Sara M. Green, Nina Ha, Zenia Kish, Jana Lipman, Louisa Schein, April Shemak, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Celina Su, and Miriam Ticktin

For more information, click HERE.

This symposium will explore the contributions that the humanities and cultural studies make to our understanding of refugee experience, by bring together scholars and practitioners who engage refugees as artists, activists, and combatants, rather than as “fearful people” without agency.

Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th & 5th Floors

Eliot Borenstein
Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, Borenstein is the author of Overkill: Sex, Violence, and Russian Popular Culture after 1991 and Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929. He is also editor and co-translator of Russian Postmodernism: Dialogue with Chaos by Mark Lipovetsky and has published numerous articles on contemporary Russian culture.

David Campbell
Professor of Cultural and Political Geography and a member of the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies at Durham University. His many publications include the books National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, and Politics Without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics and the Narratives of the Gulf War. He is currently working on a book about the global image economy and its production of pictorial representations of atrocity, famine, and war.

Ilana Feldman
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University. She has published articles in a number of journals including Cultural Anthropology, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and History and Memory. Her book, Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority and the Work of Rule (1917-67), is in press with Duke University Press. She is editing a volume in progress entitled Government and Humanity.

Sara M. Green
Sara is Executive Director of A.R.T. (Art for Refugees in Transition), which she founded in 1999 in response to the humanitarian crisis in the Balkans. She has worked with refugee populations in Kosovo, Colombia and Thailand, where A.R.T. develops self-sustaining programs that draw on each community’s indigenous art forms and enable community elders to educate and incorporate younger generations in their cultural traditions. Sara earned her MBA from Columbia University, and also has a BFA in dance and danced professionally for ten years in the U.S. and Europe.

Nina Ha
Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Director of the World Literature Program at Creighton University. Her book in progress is titled American ‘Gook’ Examining Diasporic Vietnamese Masculinity and Sexuality.

Thomas Keenan
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and the Director of the Human Rights Project at Bard College. His publications include the book Fables of Responsibility as well as articles in PMLA, The New York Times, Wired, Aperture, Bidoun, and Political Theory. He is the editor of The End(s) of the Museum and the co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, New Media, Old Media, and other titles.

Zenia Kish
Ph.D. student in the American Studies Program at New York University. Her Master’s thesis in Media Studies examined representations of survivors and the politics of refugeeness in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She has published on post-Katrina hip-hop in American Quarterly. Her doctoral studies concentrate on human rights, the reproduction of third world underdevelopment, agricultural imperialism and right to food movements.

Jana Lipman
Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Tulane University. She is the author of Guantanamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution, as well as articles about the role of the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay in foreign relations. She is currently writing about the relation of U.S. military bases and their significance for refugees and human rights in the second half of the twentieth century.

Louisa Schein
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics and the book-in-progress, Rewind to Home: Hmong Media and Gendered Diaspora. She is also the co-editor of Translocal China: Linkages, Identities and the Reimagining of Space and the forthcoming Media, Erotics and Transnational Asia.

April Shemak
Assistant Professor of English as Sam Houston State University. She has published articles in Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, and Postcolonial Text and is the author of the forthcoming book, Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse.

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi
Currently a doctoral student at New York University writing her dissertation on the protection and governance of refugees as expressed in the architecture of camps and the broader urban, geographical, and cultural impacts of emergency planning for refugees. She is the author of The Library Book: Design Collaborations in the Public Schools about an initiative to revolutionize the culture of education to combat poverty in low-income New York City neighborhoods. Her background includes nonprofit work, freelance journalism, and architectural practice.

Celina Su
Associate Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Her work looks at civil society and the cultural politics of education and health policy. She is the author of Streetwise for Book Smarts and co-authored Our Schools Suck (with Gaston Alonso, Noel Anderson, and Jeanne Theoharis). She is the co-founding Program Officer for the Burmese Refugee Project, a non-profit organization that develops participatory models for community development among Shan refugees living in Thailand.

Miriam Ticktin
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at the New School for Social Research. Her research interests include anthropology of the human and humanitarianism; migration, camps and borders; sexual violence/violence against women; PTSD/trauma, and psychiatric humanitarianism. Her articles appear in American Ethnologist, SIGNS, Interventions, Ethnicities, and The Political and Legal Anthropology Review. Her forthcoming book, The Moral Emergency Complex: Humanitarianism, Sexual Violence and the Politics of Immigration in France, looks at how politics are enacted in the name of care and protection, under threat of emergency. She has also co-edited with Ilana Feldman the forthcoming volume, In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care.

Organized by the NYU Department of Social and Cultural Analysis; co-sponsored by CSGS.

Sexed Asian Machines: On the Communicability of Multimedia

Robert — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:47:51 +0000

A Brown Bag Lunch Talk with Jian Chen

September 20, Monday
12:30 to 1:45 pm

Jian Chen, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU

Prior to the multimedia convergence initiated by mass digitalization, documentary and pornographic film/video offered the experiences of communicability and interactivity now attributed to “post-cinematic” multimedia. Pornography and documentary are arguably anti-cinematic forms that work through communicative relays between viewers and film/video, rather than immersive spectatorship, and through visible technological mediation, in contrast to aesthetic signatures or spectacle. Whether through claims to authenticity or the pleasure of fantasy, these two genres also initiate the kinds of cross-cultural contact celebrated more belatedly, and with more polished veneer, in global Hollywood cinema. Chen’s talk will focus on semi-documentaries on sex work and mainstream online pornography, which feature Asian feminine subjects. Chen contends that these docu/porn forms make potentially explicit the paradoxical relationships between autonomy and control, enjoyment and labor, shaping image consumption and cultural visibility within transnational neoliberal capitalism. And Chen’s talk will explore the racial, sexual fantasies that support the imagined free-flow circulation of images and information within multimedia public spheres.

41-51 East 11th Street, Room 709
between University Place and Broadway
(wheelchair access at 85-87 University Place, between 11th and 12th Streets)

Part of the Brown Bag Lunch Talk Series — bring your own lunch and we’ll provide beverages and dessert!

Jian Chen is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. Chen’s current research explores new demands made on cultural consumption, representation, and politics, with the transnational circulation of sexed racial and ethnic images in post-cinematic film and media. Chen’s work brings into conversation the areas of queer and transgender critique; film, new media, and visual cultures; East Asian diasporas; and comparative racial politics. S/he received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine in 2009 and B.A. degrees in Ethnic Studies and English at the University of California, Berkeley. Chen’s article “Sex Without Friction: the Limits of Multi-Mediated Human Subjectivity in Cheang Shu Lea’s Tech-Porn” is forthcoming in the electronic journal Postmodern Culture.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute.

Ah Kua Show: A Singapore Transsexual’s Journey to Womanhood

Robert — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:53:48 +0000

The Ah Kua Show, a stage adapation of Leona Lo’s autobiography, From Leonard to Leona, A Singapore Transsexual’s Journey to Womanhood, was first staged in Singapore in August 2009. This year, the play will open at the New York International Fringe Festival at 4.30 pm on Saturday, 21 Aug 2010.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: Body of Work, Body of Art

Robert — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:40:59 +0000

Transgendered Canadian performance artist Nina Arsenault has been characterized as cyborg, intellectual, and artist. After sixty plastic surgeries to feminize and beautify her originally male body, Arsenault has become an icon for a new queer generation. Her stage plays, electronic presence through videos disseminated online, website, blog, social networking presentation sites, her print media writing, and her celebrity/nightclub appearances as well as writings about her life and work alternately objectify and subjectify her: she is both artist and work of art.

Rejecting the binary of real versus fake and dedicated to exploring authenticity, Arsenault’s work continues to examine the relationship of the omnipresent female self within the newly constructed female body, while critics, theorists and documentarians continue to engage in an examination of the artist as art.

TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: Body of Work, Body of Art, to be published by Intellect Books Ltd, UK in 2012 will be edited by Judith Rudakoff. Included will be academic essays, critical response papers, popular media articles, Arsenault’s writing and colour photographs.

Submissions from the perspective of theatre, video, feminist theory, queer theory, gender studies, sexual diversity studies, performance studies, cultural studies, media studies, celebrity studies or any related areas are invited in the form of academic essays, critical response papers or popular media articles on topics which may include (but are not limited to):

Longing and Belonging: Authenticity versus Realness
Queer aesthetics: the art object as beautiful, erotic, satirical, subversive, comic, tragic, blashphemous and grotesque.
Superstar reproduction: Nina Arsenault and the manufacturing of celebrity
Double vision: The masculine gaze in the art of Nina Arsenault’s femininity.
Transgressing acceptable trans-narratives: return to normative society or failed tragic queen
The artist as art
The intersections of vocal training and dramaturgy in the solo theatrical artist
Arsenault’s self-portraiture in the digital age of self-representation and self-dissemination
The democratization of social networking and the sexually discriminated artist: Arsenault’s Facebook site as installation.
Palatable empathies: Narratives of Nina Arsenault’s transformation on television and in the theatre
Titillation, ornamentation and the ritualized body: The art of geisha vs. the transsexual gay nightlife hostess
Mythology vs pathology: a crossroads for the queer artist?
Chasing the Real from inside the labyrinth of postmodern deconstructivism(s)
Blasphemous iconography: creating art that complicates the world instead of trying to save it.
Heretic transmissions: Nina Arsenault and the politics of the right and the left

Please direct all proposals and queries to Judith Rudakoff, Editor on or before September 30 2010. Essays, papers and articles selected for publication (subject to final peer review) must be received on or before February 1, 2011. For academic essays selected for publication, reading copies of Silicone Diaries or I Was Barbie will be made available for consultation.

Proposals of up to 500 words (academic essays) and up to 250 words (critical response papers or popular media articles) should be accompanied by a brief biographical statement (in Microsoft Word .doc or .rtf format) and covering email note should include your name, any affiliation, preferred email contact information.

Academic essays should be between 3000-5000 words and critical response papers and popular media articles should be between 500-1500 words.

Prospective contributors may consider source material such as but not exclusive to:

The Silicone Diaries, stage play
I Was Barbie, stage play
“Glamour Crack”, series of videos produced by Nina Arsenault http://www.youtube.com/user/venusmachina
Video representation of Nina Arsenault on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/user/ninaarsenault
Nina Arsenault’s website and blog: www.ninaarsenault.com
T Girl columns for Fab Magazine (archived electronically at http://www.fabmagazine.com/archive.html)
Publicity Archive (up to December 2009), housed in Clara Thomas Special Collections and Archives, Scott Library, York University, Toronto, Ontario. (File TPC 220)
Club/party hosting, celebrity appearances as Nina Arsenault
Appearances as fictional characters (Barbie at L’Oreal Fashion Week 2009 in Toronto, Jessica Rabbit)
Television appearances in Canada (including The Jon Dore Show (Comedy Network), Kink (Showcase), Train 48 (Global), Fashion Television and Sex Matters (CITY) )

– Judith Rudakoff, Editor TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: Body of Work, Body of Art