CFP: [Gender Studies] Queer Nature (9/19/07; NeMLA, 4/10-4/13/08)

full name / name of organization: 
Robert Azzarello
contact email: 

NeMLA Convention (10-13 April 2008) in Buffalo, New York

This panel seeks to explore the productive conjunction between queer
studies and environmental studies crystallized in the problematicâ€"but
extremely generativeâ€"notion of “queer nature.” It will situate itself
within existing scholarship in ecofeminism and queer critiques of
science, but it will push beyond these limits by exploring the profound
queerness at the heart of the human and other-than-human world. It will,
at once, take seriously queer theorists historical frustration with the
naturalization of nature, especially in terms of the violent
repercussions of naturalizing a heteronormative nature, but it will also
take seriously environmental theorists call to figure the other-than-
human world into our ethico-political theory and praxis. “Queer Nature”
will fill in a gap, a gap sadly, and vaguely, at the core of both queer
and environmental studies.

Possible topics include:

• Queer critiques of deep ecology
• Critical engagement with foundational (but untraditional)
environmental philosophers, such as Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Deleuze
• Queer reassessments of environmental literary history
• The sex life of plants
• Queer critiques of ecocriticism as a disciplinary formation
• Darwin, teleology, neo-Darwinism, and alternatives
• Reproduction and its discontents
• The queer phenomenology of ecological touching
• Biopolitics, or the political organization of life and death
• The problematization of species as a queer phenomenon
• L’aperto as queer space

Please send 250-word abstracts to Robert Azzarello at
razzarello_at_gc.cuny.edu by 15 September 2007.

===================================
 From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
            cfp_at_english.upenn.edu
             more information at
         http://cfp.english.upenn.edu
===================================
Received on Tue Aug 07 2007 - 11:08:30 EDT