Bodies at Work: Reimagining the Lines of (Re)Production

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UTA English Graduate Conference

Bodies at Work: Reimagining the Lines of (Re)Production
April 7-8, 2016, The University of Texas at Arlington
Submission Deadline: December 31, 2015
Conference Chairs: Stephanie Peebles Tavera, Robert LaRue

The University of Texas at Arlington invites 200-250 proposals for individual paper presentations as well as proposals for complete panels for our fourth annual English Graduate Conference. Please include your name, institutional affiliation, and contact email in your proposal. For complete panels, please include an abstract for the entire panel, along with brief explanations of the intended presentations.

This year's conference will address the ways in which bodies are called to work and what constitutes "bodies" and work." Often, our rhetorical use of the word "bodies" indicates our own human bodies (i.e. "my body aches"), but we might also speak of material "bodies or water," theoretical "governing bodies," or the spiritual "Body of Christ." However, as Nicole Shukin reveals in Animal Capital, conflict exists between the ways in which we talk about "bodies" and the work that bodies do and the ways in which "bodies" make meaning for themselves through work. In other words, there exists a conflict between the linguistic representations of bodies and their work and the material manifestations of bodies and their work.

Precisely, what work do these – and other – bodies do? How do we construct/interpret meaning for bodies? How do bodies construct meaning for themselves? How do the works of some bodies conflict/intersect with, redistribute/inhibit, or enhance/challenge/reconstitute the works of other bodies? What limits are there to what bodies can/will do? How does the reconceptualization of bodies force a reconceptualization of work? We invite papers that explore issues in corporeality and the work that bodies do across a variety of fields including, but not limited to:

• Posthuman/New Material bodies or interpretations of bodies
• (De)colonized bodies and postcolonialist interpretations of bodies
• Gendered/Sexualized, radicalized, queer, and/or (dis)abled bodies in literature or theory
• Speaking/non-speaking bodies and rhetorical bodies
• Non-human and/or geographical bodies
• Historicized bodies
• Textual "bodies" of work including textual studies, digital media, and canons
• Utopian/dystopian bodies, political bodies, and economies
• Bodies in archival work, recovery work, biographies, autobiographies, or memoirs