Sapphic Echoes: Representations of Female Desire in Litererature and the Visual Arts

This panel asks questions and invites responses that explore representations of female love and desire in literature and the visual arts. How have the complex poetics of female love and desire—the desire to have something, or escape something, or punish, or know—been represented over time? What strategies have been employed to subvert literary conventions defined predominantly by male perspectives on home, love, war, victory and loss? How have female characters navigated the interplay between things done (overtly) and thought (covertly) to reveal the inner web of desires, fears and conflicts that constitute a female poetics of love and longing? 

Over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, cinema, television, and related media have become increasingly central both to individual lives and to the lives of peoples, groups, and nations. Cinema has become a major form of cultural expression and films both reflect and influence the attitudes and behaviour of people, representing their tensions and anxieties, hopes and desires and incarnating social and cultural determinants of the era in which they were made. 

Decay and destruction have long been sources of fascination, inspiration and contemplation in artistic and cultural contexts. From the crumbling ruins of ancient civilizations to the ravages of time on natural landscapes, from the haunting beauty of abandoned spaces to the transformative power of decay in artistic expression, this conference aims to explore the creative potential of decay and destruction across diverse disciplines and perspectives.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

The conference seeks to explore the narratives of displacement and to demonstrate the validity of a cross-disciplinary approach which brings together the historical, cultural, social and literary expertise in the handling of text. The conference will particularly focus on time and space representations and on treatment of the theme of cultural ambivalence and identity conflict. The subject of displacement will be regarded as both a migration, voluntary or forced, and a sense of being socially or culturally “out of place”.

Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:

Humankind has always sought to explain its origins and the mysteries of life to map personal and collective boundaries, and to secure its sense of identity through the power of everyday events and occurrences. Exemplary accounts of imaginary happenings and supernatural creatures from a time beyond history and memory explain the genesis of the universe, the making of a living thing, the formation of an attitude or the inception of an institution. The essence of these traditional narratives reflects a certain system of values and code of self-conduct of a group of individuals bound together by social and cultural ties, and the cardinal virtues and vices of human nature captured in a conventional configuration.

The conference invites academics, researchers and professionals to critically examine the evolving concept of gender in its many forms and contexts. The conference seeks to explore the past and present dimensions of gender identity across the globe, analyse how societal structures are shaped by and shape gender and consider the role of gender in the broad spectrum of human experience.The theme, Que(e)rying Gender, highlights the importance of questioning, expanding and disrupting conventional understandings of gender. It emphasises the intersections between gender, power, identity and culture, encouraging innovative approaches to understanding how gender influences lived experiences and societal norms.