Sex Outdoors (NeMLA 2015, April 30-May 3, Toronto)

full name / name of organization: 
NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association)

46th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association
April 30 - May 3, 2015
Toronto, Ontario

This panel seeks papers that link sex to the outside world, historicizing models of desire and pleasure that somehow exceed subjectivity or personhood. We're particularly interested in projects dealing with materials circulating in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, before or at the cusp of sexology and psychoanalysis—that represent the experiences and expressions of what we now call sexuality, but do so in ways that resist the organizational force that term implies. Our hope is to ask, along with Sharon Marcus, "what remains to be seen if we proceed without Oedipus, without castration, without the male traffic in women, without homophobia and homosexual panic"—without, in a word, interiority. How, in turn, can these alternative models of sexual exteriority help us to rethink key axes in the grid of public intelligibility: visible/invisible, respectable/vulgar, intimate/alienated, institutional/personal, and social/private?

Possible approaches include, but are by no means limited to:
• critical race studies
• feminist studies and women's history
• queer ecology
• urban ecology
• phenomenology
• affect studies
• network theory
• religious studies / postdisenchantment
• histories of institutions
• science studies

Deadline for abstracts: September 30, 2014

This year, NeMLA is switching to a user-based system to process abstract submissions. Interested scholars should submit 300-500 word abstracts to Laura Fisher and Travis Foster through the NeMLA website using the link below.

https://nemla.org/convention/2015/cfp.html#cfp15448

For questions about the new submission system, you can contact NeMLA web support here: websupport@nemla.org.