Love, Violence, and Feminine Resistance: Dis-/placement, Reckoning, and Reconciliation  

This interdisciplinary conference approaches the phenomena of forced displacement and mass migration by focusing on works of dis-/placed female artists and exploring the ways that these artists have articulated and imagined myriad forms of identity, resistance, belonging, and home. This conference invites paper proposals, video essays (finished and works-in-progress) to reflect on how the material and symbolic dilemmas of dis/placement, definitions/categorizations of “female”, and conceptualizations of inside and outside—from the boundaries of nation states, to the familial, to those of race, class, gender, and sexuality—are negotiated across aesthetic categories and transnational geographies. This conference sets out to trace, then, the ways in which poetics of dis-/placement and re-/integration might communicate contemporary entanglements of love, violence, and feminine resistance and consider how notions of reckoning and reconciliation might counter structural violence(s), criminalization, and racialization related to myriad forms of female of dis-/placement. At the same time, this event aims to consider the racial and cultural tensions of dis-/placement and take into account the limits and possibilities of building communities across racial, cultural, geographical, and generational borders.   While all proposals are welcome under this larger, broader thematic, we especially invite proposals that focus on the works of dis-/placed Latin American female artists in particular.  

Possible topics of papers and video essays include, but are not limited to:

• Poetics and politics of dis-/placement in film, literature and art

• Displaced identities and mobile boundaries

• “Feminine” subjectivities as political resistance

• Gendered subjectivities and memory politics

• Artistic imaginings of home and belonging

• Racial, cultural and de-colonial tensions of displacement

• Afro Latinx Female aesthetics

• Critical examinations of political and legal definitions/categorizations or public discourses about human rights, criminalization, and racialization

• Considerations of how intimate and/or subjective narratives might coalesce into collective and political dimensions

• The ethics of representation and storytelling

• Internal exile and gender

• Racialized dispossession and dis-/placement

• Labor

• And more  

Keynotes: Carolina Sourdis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona  & 

Elizabeth Ramirez-Soto, San Francisco State University

We ask that all presentations be limited to 20 minutes. For video essays, the presentation can consist of a maximum of 10 minutes of screening (an excerpt can be chosen if the essay exceeds this limit) with the remaining time dedicated to presentation by the author.Proposals must comprise a 300-word max abstract for papers, and for the video essay a 300-word author statement where the sources of the images that are used in the essay are specified.

All proposals should also include full name, affiliation (if any) and a 100-word bio. We especially invite hybrid proposals between scholarly and creative work. Presntations are welcome in English or Spanish. Lastly, thanks to the generosity of the Global Latinidades Project and the Multicultural Center, limited funding for airfare, lodging, etc. is available for some accepted presentations (via reimbursement).  

Please email proposals to:

conference.lvfr.ucsb@gmail.com

Submission deadline: March 27th, 2023

Selected participants will be notified of their acceptance by April 3rd, 2023

Date of the conference: May 12th, 2023  

Conference made possible by the generosity of:

The Global Latinidades Project, The Multicultural Center, The Graduate Center for Literary Research, The Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, The Spanish and Portuguese Dept., and the Latin American & Iberian Studies Program

Conference Website here