cfp.english.upenn.edu

Call for Papers
“Sex and Love in Asian Contexts”
2010 Film & History Conference: Representations of Love in Film and Television
November 11-14, 2010
Hyatt Regency Milwaukee
www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory
Second-Round Deadline: November 1, 2009

AREA: “Sex and Love in Asian Contexts”

Asia has, perhaps, the richest history of cultural and commercial exchange in the world, resulting in deeply layered religious, political, and artistic traditions. In cinema, for example, sex and love often are bound up in complex rites, taboos, negotiations, honor codes, pieties, and spiritual allegiances. How do Asians themselves see or represent love? How do non-Asians see or represent love in Asian contexts?

This area, comprising multiple panels, welcomes papers treating the representations of love and sex within, or from the perspective of, Asian contexts (East, West, Central, South, Southeast). Proposals for full panels should include the individual proposals for 3-4 presenters. Possible topics:

• traditional and customary practices—loved or hated
• treatments of historical and modern extra-marital sex and sex workers
• love and sex--including homosexuality--as indexes of modernity, cosmo-
politanism, or the status of women
• love and sex in pre-modern inter-Asian narrative
• modern international influences (American and European)
• distinctively indigenous traditions (Bollywood, Japanese studios, etc.)
• new developments in contemporary pan-Asian cinema
• new developments in the films of Islamic cultures
• adaptations

Please send your 200-word proposal by e-mail to the area chair:

S.A. Thornton
Department of History
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-4302
Email: Sybil.Thornton@asu.edu (email submissions preferred)

Panel proposals for up to four presenters are also welcome, but each presenter must submit his or her own paper proposal. For updates and registration information about the upcoming meeting, see the Film & History website (www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory).