[Englecturers] FW: Desire and Queer Genders in Early Twentieth-Century Literature (3/15/06; MLA '06)

[Steven Axelrod]

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-cfp at lists.sas.upenn.edu [mailto:owner-cfp at lists.sas.upenn.edu]
On Behalf Of Chris Coffman
Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2006 12:33 PM
To: cfp at english.upenn.edu
Subject: CFP: Desire and Queer Genders in Early Twentieth-Century Literature
(3/15/06; MLA '06)


Desire and Queer Genders in Early Twentieth-Century Literature Proposed
Special Session for the Modern Language Association, Philadelphia,
12/27/06-12/30/06

As recent work in transgender studies by scholars such as Judith Halberstam
(Female Masculinity and In a Queer Time and Place) and Jay Prosser (Second
Skins) has shown, the category of gender has become especially productive
for queer scholarship on early twentieth-century literature.  While Diana
Fuss (Identification Papers) and others have explored the way in which
identification, understood in psychoanalytic terms, confounds the project of
staking claim to identities, there has been little work in queer theory that
has sought to understand the difficulties that desire poses for that same
project.  Accustomed to thinking of the subject in a Freudian manner-as
formed by the history of his or her identifications-we have come, in turn,
to consider gender to be the product of identification alone.  What this
occludes is the possibility that desire--whether our own or that of our
objects of desire--might have as much of a pull as identification on our
relationship to gender, and, as such, be fraught with difficulties that
demand our attention.

For a proposed Special Session at the 2006 Modern Language Association
Convention in Philadelphia (December 27-30, 2006), I am soliciting abstracts
of papers that consider early twentieth-century literature on queer gender
identities and/or identifications in tandem with the concept
of desire.  What pull does desire have on gender?   Please send a 250-word
abstract of your paper-not the paper itself-by March 15, 2006 to me at
ffcc1 at uaf.edu.

All scholars submitting abstracts will be notified by March 31 about whether
their papers have been included in my proposal, and will need to be members
of the MLA by that time.

Chris Coffman, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
University of Alaska Fairbanks
http://www.faculty.uaf.edu/ffcc1



Chris Coffman, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
University of Alaska Fairbanks

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