CFP: "Spanking and Poetry": A Conference on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

"Spanking and Poetry": A Conference on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
English Student Association Conference, Feb 25-26, 2010
The Graduate Center
The City University of New York
New York, New York

Submit abstracts of 300 words or less to sedgwickconference@gmail.com by November 15, 2009. Check http://sedgwickconference.wordpress.com for further information as the conference approaches.

"When I was a child the two most rhythmic things that happened to me were spanking and poetry." (Tendencies 182)

Eve Sedgwick lovingly, if none too gently, slapped open the sphincter-tight boundary rings of critical scholarship on the sexual and affective relations between bodies. This conference invites continued play with the tools she created for examination of "all the different surfaces that make a self for most of us, printed pages, 'our' ideas, institutional relations and activism, vibrations of a voice, the gaping abstractions and distractions of creativity, the weird holographic projections of our names and public personae, the visible and impressible extent of the parts of our bodies" (Tendencies 104-05). We welcome paper proposals on any aspect or application of her critical, literary, and artistic work, inviting scholars to broadly consider and reconsider Sedgwick's intersections with and influences upon their fields. In the spirit of her own perversion of academic style, we particularly encourage proposals that expand the boundaries of the conventional conference paper through experimental or creative critical practices. We also seek papers engaging with Sedgwick's pedagogical practices and proposals, as expressed in her written work or as performed in her classes at The Graduate Center or other institutions.

Professors Jonathan Goldberg and Michael Moon of Emory University will be presenting the keynote address entitled "On the Eve of the Future." Professor Goldberg will be discussing the Eve Sedgwick's unpublished work that he's assembling as her literary executor, while Professor Moon will speak about the continuing impact of Sedgwick's work.

Topics may include but are in no way limited to
Aesthetics of the critical eye
Affect and the critical project
Beside the repressive hypothesis
Binary structures and Buddhist practice
The body in queer theory
Experimental critical writing
Fisting-as-écriture
Habit
Identification and loss
Near-miss pedagogy
Non-Oedipal & postmodernist psychologies
Performativity and peri-performativity
Queer gods and goddesses
Queer theory and mortality
Reparative reading
Sedgwick and Ricoeur's 'hermeneutics of suspicion'
Shame and generic discipline
Textiles & fiber art

The conference is open to scholars at all levels. Contact Tracy Riley and Margaret Galvan at sedgwickconference@gmail.com with any questions about the conference.