We are seeking paper proposals for the panel "Representing Women's Medico-Literary Texts in the Long Eighteenth Century," which will occur during the annual NEASECS meeting to be held in Buffalo from October 21-23, 2010. The CFP and the link to the conference page is below. If you are interested in submitting a paper proposal, please email a 250 word abstract and a brief CV by May 15.

Over the past several decades, critics have explored how literature and medical texts represented and often objectified women during the long eighteenth century. In addition to examining representations of women, their bodies, and "female" illnesses – both in medical and literary texts -- this panel also considers how women responded or "wrote back" to such objectification. We are especially interested in papers that explore the various ways in which women directly adopt, negotiate, or manipulate discourses of medicine, whether about their own bodies or the bodies of others. In so doing, the panel hopes to demonstrate how women writers were able to carve out their own empowered textual space in the increasingly male-dominated medical realm. Possible authors include (but are not limited to) Ann Conway, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Mary Wortley Montagu, Joanna Baille, Ann Hunter, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Mary Robinson; potential textual sources include signed and anonymous midwifery and cookery books.

Conference information: http://www.buffalostate.edu/neasecs/x559.xml