Cinematic Desire
A CUNY Graduate Center interdisciplinary conference
Sponsored by the Cinema Studies Group
March 4-5, 2010
UPDATED deadline for abstracts: December 11, 2009

Conference site: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/filmstudies/csg/conference/index.html

"Cinematic Desire" is an interdisciplinary graduate conference organized and sponsored by the Cinema Studies Group of the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. The conference seeks to explore the role desire has historically played in and around the cinema: its representation and (re)production on screen, its reception and interpretation by the audience, and the feelings the medium itself inspires.

We invite proposals for 15-20 minute presentations that engage with these cinematic issues. Equal consideration will be given to panel submissions of 3–4 participants.

Possible topics might include (but are not limited to):

- Typologies of desire
- Genre: expectations and conventions
- Staging desire: "sex scenes" and erotic spectacle
- (De)coding desire: psychoanalysis and spectatorship
- The pleasures of the medium: cinephilia, fandom
- Affect and emotional response ("body genres," etc.)
- Illicit, deviant, or pathological desire
- Suppressed desire: intimation, euphemism, and double entendre
- Regulating desire: censorship, ratings, and the code
- Ethics: can film (be) corrupt?
- Sex and marketing
- Desire on display: pornography and peep-shows
- Desire in action: video games, avatars, "second lives"
- Public vs. private pleasures: the displacement of public spectatorship with "private" viewing devices

Submit 300-word abstracts by December 11, 2009 to Elizabeth Alsop and Kelley Kawano at gccinemastudies@gmail.com.

Please include your name, affiliation (where appropriate), telephone number, postal and e-mail addresses with your submissions, as well as any audio-visual requirements you may have.