Sexual (Dis)continuities: A Graduate Student Conference

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CUNY Graduate Center, Department of French

Foucault's influence on the field of sexuality studies is undeniable, yet many scholars have taken him to task for his famous assertion that the nineteenth-century gave birth to the homosexual as "un personnage" whereas the sodomite was simply "un sujet juridique". These distinctions between acts and persona, between alterity and continuum have been vigorously analyzed and debated by scholars in all areas of sexuality studies, including hetero-, homo- and queer sexualities. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick sharply criticized this divide as presupposing that the modern homosexual is a "coherent definitional field", and that earlier sexual categories simply disappear as new ones take over. In taking Sedgwick's consideration that sexualities and sexual categories are always unstable and always ever imbricated in historical sexual typologies, eroticisms, and desires, this conference seeks to question the pertinence of the divisions between early modern and modern, modern and postmodern periods in regards to sexualities and their representations in French and Francophone literature.

Valerie Traub advocates a genealogical approach to the study of sexuality, arguing that one must recognize historical alterity while not "assum[ing] homology". This epistemological challenge invites us to examine sexualities in all of their complexity, to question rather than solve oppositions such as past and present, nature and culture, acts and identity. If this approach has been relevant for scholars interested in looking back in a different (queer?) way to past manifestations and representations of sexualities, it also puts into perspective the conflictual relationship between modern conceptions of sexuality embedded in identity politics and postmodern queer sexualities (Lynne Huffer's work on ethics and futurity is a recent example).

This conference will seek to answer some of the following questions: what traces of sexualities can we discern in French and Francophone literary texts? Are there particular divisions or similarities that we can ascertain from one period to another, between genres, movements, authors? How are sexualities (re)presented and disseminated? Which artistic, philosophical or political motives might texts dealing with sexuality be concealing, or promulgating? Is there still a need for the "acts paradigm" approach to sexualities, or does "doing the history of sexuality" require a different set of tools?

We invite graduate researchers and theorists to examine early modern, modern and postmodern sexualities in French-language literary texts from a wide variety of philosophical, disciplinary, and critical perspectives. Below is list of potential, but not exhaustive, themes:

- women's studies, gender theory, and queer theory approaches to literature
- gender roles and performance, femininity/masculinity
- transgender, transsexuality
- homosociality, homo- and heteroeroticism
- love, passion, and friendship
- cuckoldry, adultery, and marriage
- sodomy, tribades and other sexual "categories"
- prostitution
- fetishization, objectification, voyeurism
- pornography and post-pornography
- sexual revolution and identity politics

Send abstracts of 200-300 words to the Conference Committee, sexualdiscontinuities@gmail.com. Presentations will be limited to 15-20 minutes in length and participation is limited to graduate students (MA and PhD). Abstracts and presentations may be in French or English. Deadline for abstracts: 30 November 2014.