Monday 20th October – Wednesday 22nd October 2014, Montreal, Quebec,
Canada
Call for Presentations:
How do we understand the different desires and pleasures that people
engage in, and by which they define who they are and how they interact
with others? How do we conceive of and make sense of different
sexualities beyond simple and often flawed notions of ‘normal’ and
‘abnormal’ or ‘deviant’ or ‘perverse’? What is at stake
when we discuss sex and sexuality in the context of embodiment and the
material (and messy) physicality of sex play? How do desires,
identities, behaviours and practices interplay in sexual expressions
in contemporary life? What challenging questions do we face in
researching and theorising sexuality in the 21st Century?
The study of sexuality has developed significantly over the last 20
years and this revamping of the ‘sexualities’ conference seeks to
explore issues of sex and sexuality relationally. It departs from the
understanding that sexuality is socially constructed and reproduced
through practices. Classifications and definitions of sex, gender and
sexuality are constructed in our culture but they come “alive” and
are embodied as people define themselves as particular sexual
subjects, and engage in sex according to specific orientations and
desires. This position-taking of individuals occurs in the context of
specific social spaces and social structures, such as gender, class,
race and ethnicity, etc. As people intimately interface and erotically
engage with one another, sexual practices are reproduced and
re-grooved, at times shaping and ingraining classifications of
difference and inequality; at times new and novel ways to understand
and live sexuality are forged, transforming the realm of possibility
beyond the normative.
The project seeks to develop a space for discussion and debate about
the interplay of identities, orientations, desires, pleasures, taboos,
relations, behaviours and practices of sex and sexuality across a
range of critical, contextual and cultural perspectives. Seeking to
encourage innovative, creative, inter, multi and post disciplinary
dialogues in national and global contexts, we welcome papers from all
disciplines, professions and vocations which struggle to understand
what it is to be sexual and how sex and sexuality are negotiated and
lived. We particularly welcome papers that explore the creative spaces
where biology, sexology, psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, arts
and humanities, philosophy and contemporary theories and critiques –
social constructionism, queer theory, crip theory and affect theory
– collide, oppose, conjoin and intermesh, bringing one another to
fruitful crisis.
We welcome traditional papers, panels, workshop proposals and other
forms of performance – recognising that different disciplines
express themselves in different mediums and seek submissions on any of
the following themes:
1) Being/Desiring/Doing
-Homogeneity and heterogeneity, sameness and diversity, identity and
fluid sexualities.
-Theories sexuality – merging social constructionism, queer theory,
crip theory and affect theory.
-The other from within; unfixed sexualities, fluid identities; a
sexual ethics for our times.
-What are the limits and scope to defining ourselves in social spaces
through our desires?
-Structures, institutions and systems.
-Acts and interactions; representations and symbols.
2) Sexual and Embodied Practices
-Embodiment, bodies and mapping desires in flesh.
-Sex as economic, social and symbolic capital.
-Bonds of lust and desire; unleashing and containing; unlocking and
repressing.
-Body rituals and exchange: aesthetics, explorations, games,
representations.
-Persons re-inventing their bodies, desires and lust.
-Consumption and consumerism: sex for purchase, sex work, sex toys.
3) Sexual Space/ Sexual Time
-The public and the private: linking social and intimate identities
and sexuality.
-Hooking-up, casual sex, one-night stands; sex with strangers.
-Local sexualities, international sexualities; sexual tourism.
-Pre-modern, modern and postmodern sexualities and their expressions.
-Old tech, new tech, new sex? Phone sex, cyber-sex, web sex and
virtual sex.
4) Sexual Affect and Relationships
-Sexual relationships: from marriage to fuck buddies.
-The entanglements of romance and desire, sex and social relations,
love and pleasure.
-Norms that rule our sexual lives; the death or killing of desire and
lust.
-The meaning of sexual relationships: commitment, respect, exchange,
use.
-Isolation, loneliness, estrangement and sexual deprivation.
-Pleasures of the self; masturbation as detached sex?
-Detachment and the destruction of trust; betrayal, cheating and
infidelity.
-Separation, mourning and bereavement; unlinking, unloving and
unsexing.
5) Narrative, Aesthetic and Creative Representations of Sexuality
-The theatre of sex and sexual beings; sex on stage and on the stage
of life.
-The secular and the religious; the heretical and the sacred and their
place in our desires.
-Dreams, fantasies and desire; symbols, meaning and the unconscious.
-Unfixing sexual categories of the self through art and artistic
creation and narratives.
-The grammar of lust and desire in artistic creation and
representation.
-Pornography and the erotic: artistic representation, aesthetic and
creative virtue, narrative displacement?
-Is there a creation of new sexual territories by way of art and the
aesthetic realm?
6) Sexual Citizenship: Belonging and Activism
-Sexual diversity – scope and limits?
-Sex, health and safety and the impact of technologies and medicine.
-New sexual expertise, changing understandings of the sexual?
-Inequality, power relations, domination and sexuality.
-Normalisation and the good sexual citizen; dissidence and the refusal
to comply.
-Social movements and their impact on rights and institutional change.
-Sexual freedom, personhood, resistance and rebellion.
7) Uncomfortable Territories
-Violence and sex; sexual abuse; abjection and sexuality; subjection
and the sexual self.
-Sex and animals, sex and pets; sex, desire and love across species
boundaries.
-Family, blood bonds and sex within boundaries of kinship; desire, sex
and incest.
-Sex games and sexual play that make people uncomfortable.
-Scatological desire and sex; death, lust and sex.
-Dislocated, homeless, disassociated, uprooted sex, desire and lust.
Proposals will be considered on any related theme.
What to send:
300 word proposals should be submitted by Friday 11th July 2014. If an
abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be
submitted by Friday 17th September 2014. Abstracts should be submitted
simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word or
RTF formats with the following information and in this order
a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in
programme, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of
abstract, f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: Sexualities 7 Abstract Submission.
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using
footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as
bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all
paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a
week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be
lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative
electronic route or resend.
Organising Chairs:
Serena Petrella: serep@inter-disciplinary.net
Rob Fisher: sexualities7@inter-disciplinary.net
The conference is part of the Gender and Sexuality programme of
research projects. It aims to bring together people from different
areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions
which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and
presented at the conference must be in English and will be eligible
for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for
publication in a themed hard copy volume(s). All publications from the
conference will require editors, to be chosen from interested
delegates from the conference.
Inter-Disciplinary.Net believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and
professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should
attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make
this commitment, please do not submit an abstract for presentation.
For further details of the conference, please visit:
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