gender studies and sexuality

ACLA 2027 Virtual Symposium: What We Are Going to Become?: Dysphoria Mundi, Weird , Excess

Contact Information

Elif Sendur, es1037@scarletmail. rutgers.edu

es1037@scarletmail.rutgers.edu

URL

https://www.acla.org/seminar/476406f6-1280-48ea-a968-33ae461c37d5

Announcement Type

Conference

Subject Fields

This MLA just-in-time panel explores the evolving status of non-binariness in trans studies and beyond. Following Marquis Bey’s Nonbinary Life, we ask: Is non-binariness an emancipatory narrative? What are its critical potentialities and limitations? Send 150-200 word abstracts + bio to m.stekl@colostate.edu by 8/21. (The MLA will take place in Los Angeles from 7 to 10 January 2027.)

CALL FOR PAPERS — NeMLA 2027 Seminar

Salve Regina University, Newport, RI | March 6–9, 2027

Can Literary Criticism Break Free of the Silos Trap — and Carry Literature Along?

In the early 1950s, Lacan admonished psychoanalysts for operating within Newtonian epistemology fifty years after Einstein and Heisenberg had dismantled it. It may be worth asking ourselves whether we, literary critics, 125 years later, have adjusted our analytical machine — or, at least, whether it is necessary that we do.

This issue’s oxymoronic title, “Inconspicuously Fabulous,” calls attention to the generative tensions, limitations, and potentials of visuality as they pertain to minoritarian subjects. What does it mean to present oneself in and as excess while remaining unseen or unnoticed? Like madison moore, who offers a critical queer-of-color reiteration of economist Thorstein Veblen’s concept of “conspicuous consumption” as grotesque public display of economic power and prestige, we think through negotiated visibility as a survival strategy, or a pleasurable and simultaneously risky method of living as a spectacle in the margins.

The structure of Joan of Arc's early phase invites comparison to archetypal heroic narrative: reluctant departure, rejected petitioner, gatekeepers to persuade or evade, and the acquisition of skills and resolve before the great undertaking. Whether such comparisons illuminate Joan’s experience, distort it, or reveal more about her interpreters than Joan herself is the question this panel opens. What do we actually know about Joan before she became Joan? How have scholars, hagiographers, filmmakers, and popular adapters handled the silence and ambiguity of her early life? When Joan is made to fit a pattern, which Joan gets left out?

Description: Since the 1990s, there has been an ever-growing list of adaptions on early modern women, from Elizabeth (1998) to The Tudors, to Reign, to Mary Queen of Scotts (2018), to the countless depictions of Anne Boleyn. Each of these productions attempt to negotiate a happy medium between maintaining historical accuracy and entertaining a modern audience who may not be familiar with or care about the complicated politics of the early modern world. Adaptions of early modern women are not limited to the screen, but can also be found in music, art, and pop culture.