gender studies and sexuality

Stony Brook University
32nd Annual English Graduate Conference
February 28, 2020

After the success of the Folk Horror in the Twenty First Century conference hosted by Falmouth University, we are holding another related conference in 2020.

The present is dark. With the rise of right-wing populism, global migrations and immigrations, continued violence, abuse and crime, prejudice and intolerance, there is increasing anxiety about the future. The Earth itself is under threat from environmental catastrophe and a mass extinction event is anticipated. The collapse of society, morality, and the environment was often also feared in the past, particularly in Gothic, horror and dystopian fictions and texts. What were the monsters of the past? What are our monsters now?

Theorizing about the body has never been more urgent than in our current era of climate change. Stacy Alaimo has compellingly argued that “potent ethical and political possibilities emerge from the literal contact zone between human corporeality and more-than-human nature.” In the decade or so since she first penned those words, these ethical and political possibilities have become even more urgent, and the borders of the contact zones themselves have become more blurred. Climate change has had increasingly intimate corporeal implications (especially in the Global South), and the widening gap between the rich and the poor has only exacerbated these matters, as has the global rise in right-wing extremism.

Experience: Identity, Society, and Culture
Southwest Humanities Symposium , February 20-22
Submission Deadline: Extended to December 20, 2019
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Phillip Carter, Florida International University

The circulation, commodification, and repression of discourses on genders and sexualities within and among Asian countries has been a constant feature of regimes of modernization, from colonial through neocolonial and postcolonial periods. Aptly enough, it is mainly through the modern vehicle of cinema where these discourses play out. Kritika Kultura will be initiating a forum on the filmic representations of issues on genders and sexualities in the Southeast Asian region, in line with its commitment to the pursuit and development of cultural and media studies, slated for the journal’s February 2021 issue.