CFP Panel Visualizing Home and Homeland in Pan-Asian Film and Dramas

Association for Asian Studies, 2023 Annual Conference Boston, MA and virtual 

Virtual Format, February 17-18, 2023

AUGUST 5, 2022

Send a 250-word abstract and a 150-word bio by AUGUST 5, 2022 to jean_amato@fitnyc.edu

Panel Organizers:

Jean Amato, Associate Professor; Comparative Literature; Fashion Institute of Technology

Kyunghee Pyun, Associate Professor; Art History; Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY

Jean Amato and Kyunghee Pyun are editing an anthology on the representation of home and ancestral homeland in visual art/film/performing arts. Pyun is an art historian; Amato is a scholar of comparative literature and film whose research centers on homeland studies, diaspora and cultural geography. 

Papers in this panel focus on media representations of home/homeland by various Asian filmmakers and media artists to present shared, multifaceted, and often contested experiences of place. Our panel calls for papers from film and media studies scholars that reflect on how the diverse, layered, rich, and fluid representations of our homes, domestic spaces, and homelands can reframe our way of viewing the material and imaginative geographies of our lives— from domestic to transnational scales, and on micro and macro levels.Our homes and homelands never stay in place—they move on without us therefore,  this panel is designed to critique standard practices of fixing and mapping, and commonly gendered depictions of domestic space—whereby homes and ancestral homelands are often held in place by legacies of sexism, homophobia, patriarchal constraints, nativism, Orientalism, imperialism, colonialism, and racist housing and immigration policies.

By closely examining depictions of domestic realms on our screens, we can better unpack the pervasive and universal pull of the idea of home with all its fluid entanglements, under-examined layers of affiliations, conflicts, and intersectional relationships. Papers can zoom out to explore transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, nation, region, community, urban or rural spaces and find ways to meaningfully remap the histories, injustices, erasures, displacements, migrations, and demolitions around the spaces and places we call home. Papers might zoom in and map out the filmic depictions of our daily domestic rituals, objects, structures, sensory details, and movements; to uncover ways we continually perform and enact ideas of home and belonging. Papers that look at film and media in light of gender/sexuality studies and/or queer theory are especially welcome. 

Submissions might address some of the following questions: How do our daily routines, and familial dynamics affirm or challenge our senses of belonging and place? How do representations of domestic space on the screen interrogate the private and public hierarchies of affiliation or belonging at play in the everyday actions and domestic spaces we call home? How is a cinematic home presented as the smallest unit of a territorialized sense of belonging? What is the relation of cosmopolitanism to patriotism, or what does it mean to write of being at home in the world? Do filmmakers have the space to engage in this concept?  How do filmmakers unpack the myth of the home or ancestral homeland as the place that never changes? How has Covid-19 changed media depictions of public and private, domestic routines and spaces? How is the sense of home connected to the production of a place in films and dramas? How do works challenge conventional uses of domestic spaces and/or manipulate our conceptions of inclusion and exclusion? How do works reveal the public and private renegotiations involved in any “return” journey to an ancestral home? How does “memory” of an ancestral homeland operate when remembered across migrations, languages, host lands and border crossings?

Some presentations might also explore how queer intimacy is revealed, voyerized, or concealed in domestic cinematic spaces and popular media. How is hegemonic masculinity constructed in the spatial layout of a cinematic home and do they convey or disallow queer or gender non-binary subjectivities in terms of domestic space. By privileging public space as a site of possible queer intimacy rather than domestic space, do works challenge or reaffirm heteronormative constructions of private/public? 

Presentors might also center on how domestic spaces are conceptualised or resignified in feminist media practices. In representations of the domestic sphere, additional questions to explore might include: How do depictions of domestic space partition bodies, space, and movement in terms of gender? How are gender norms spatially and ideologically constructed? How are the female figures (or often mother characters) usually positioned in the home as the stable icons, depicted as emblems of belonging, or embodying stasis, often marking the beginning or end of a male quest or journey? How are women often called up to conceptualize domestic spaces; particularly hybrid, border, and marginal spaces; against backdrops of globalization and urbanization? How are bodies, ideals of female purity, shame, and desire conditioned, policed or reinforced along patriarchal or nationalist narratives? 

FYI- Two-Appearances Allowed: The AAS has updated our long-standing one appearance rule! We will now allow an individual to participate in up to two (2) sessions. However, only one paper presentation appearance is allowed.