“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Does play guarantee pleasure? Does work preclude pleasure? Do you have a guilty pleasure?

This interdisciplinary conference aims to explore the dynamic relationships between play and pleasure in various literary and cultural contexts, while critically examining the contemporary debates surrounding these themes. We encourage submissions that emphasise their interconnectedness rather than treating them as separate entities. In this light, we invite scholars to redefine, subvert, or “play” with these terms.

Play and pleasure as separate concepts have been widely explored in the fields of literary studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, history and anthropology. These concepts have been intuitively linked throughout critical discourse. In recent years, however, their relationship has gained increasing critical interest in the humanities within feminist, postcolonial, and queer critical circles and the pluralisation of media forms. Can pleasure be a form of resistance, or a sign of conformity? How is our experience of play mediated by different forms of traditional and new media? How is pleasure experienced in the play of the text?

Responses might encompass, but are not limited to:

• Sexuality and gender (queerness, performativity, gender play and fluidity, gender euphoria and dysphoria, non-reproductive pleasure)
• Sex (eroticism, kink, role-playing, fetishisation, foreplay, repressed and fulfilled desire, pornography)
• Leisure and entertainment (video games, board games, card games, word games, gambling, shopping)
• Language (the playfulness of language, translation, jokes, wordplay, non-linguistic communication, figurative language, obscenity)
• Body (sensory pleasure and play, objectification, modification, presentation, embodiment, commodification, fashion and costume)
• Forms (drama, comedy, folklore and myth, rituals, fan-fiction, memes and new media, visual and auditory media, tropes)
• Excess/transgression (pulp, camp, trash, canonisation, smut, non-human/post-human pleasure, illusion and deception)
• Critical theory (History of Emotions, affect, New Materialism, phenomenology, ludology)

We are thrilled to announce that Dr Tanya Cheadle from the University of Glasgow will be delivering the keynote address with the title: "Gender Play and Sexual Pleasure: Progressive Reimaginings in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Scotland."

Open to all postgraduates and ECRs working on any period across all disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, we welcome submissions for academic research papers as well as non-traditional, interactive, and experimental engagements, on this theme across disciplines and periods. We especially encourage queer, BIPOC, disabled, and other marginalised scholars to apply.

Please submit abstracts for 20-minute presentations of no more than 250 words, along with brief biographical notes (about 50 words) to https://forms.gle/ZLXyP1fvgvFWot2v8 no later than the 30th of November. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by the 15th of January.

For further information, please contact us at segc2024@gmail.com. We look forward to welcoming you to this exciting event. “Come play with us!”