Gender, Precarity, and Narratives of Loss

deadline for submissions: 
October 12, 2016
full name / name of organization: 
Victoria Chandler
contact email: 

Call for Panelists -  2017 Narrative Conference

March 23-26, 2017, Lexington, KY

The University of Kentucky will host the Narrative Conference in Lexington, KY from March 23-26, 2017. Keynote speakers include Judith Butler, Kenneth Warren, and Linda Williams.

We seek two or three panelists to join a panel entitled “Gender, Precarity, and Narratives of Loss” 

This panel investigates the ways in which psychological and social forces inhibit mourning, and how some lives are (for socio-political reasons) more grievable than others. In particular, the panel aims to explore how Anglophone literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have represented women working through or refusing to work through loss. It will focus on questions such as, how does literature imagine women organizing their lives and embodied spaces in response to grief? How do social forces (such as patriarchy, racial oppression, or capitalism) affect feminine responses to loss or trauma? How does Judith Butler’s sense in Precarious Life that “some lives are grievable, and others are not” apply to the female imagination of mourning? In other words, what forces place some female lives in the precarious position of being un-grievable?

Please send a 250 word abstract, along with a brief scholarly biography, to Victoria Chandler (vec@email.sc.edu) by October 12th. The panel will be submitted for consideration on October 15th in accordance with the CFP; acceptance to the Narrative Conference is contingent on the panel’s acceptance.