Call For Papers: Department of Comparative Literature, Indiana University Bloomington Graduate Conference April 1-2, 2016; Crystal Queer
Clarity and understanding, sight and knowledge, are so intimately linked in contemporary discourse that we rarely find ourselves interrogating why this connection is made, how this invisible link works to produce crucial notions of what knowledge is, and who comes to know it. What does it mean to transgress? How are attempts at transgression represented textually? How do we communicate embodied experience? How can we speak across in/visibility or dis/identification? How do systems of transmission and normativity reinforce or undercut certain conceptions of texts, peoples, and ideas?
Intended as a gesture toward disrupting discursive arrangements of seeing and knowing, “Crystal Queer” troubles normative models of knowledge production, merging with questions of in/visibility, dis/identification, in/coherence, and il/legibility.
We encourage interdisciplinary and global approaches to the field of Comparative Literature. We welcome proposals from a variety of disciplines across the humanities including, but not limited to: Literary Studies, Translation Studies, Film and Media Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Disability Studies, Cultural Studies, History and Historiography, Philosophy, Critical Race Studies, and Critical Ethnic Studies.
Themes/Threads/Strands/Frames/Flows:
Normativity and Insurrection – Transmission, Translation, and Transmutation – Repression and Upheaval – Univocality and Polyvocality – Legibility, Textuality, and Sexuality – Engendering and Gendering – Cooptation and Corporeality – Sights, Sites, and Cites of Dis/identification – Optics and Ontics – In/coherence and Opacity –Graphics, Graphs, and Graphicacy – [Orna]mentation
Please send an abstract (300 words max), a title for the presentation (20 minutes max), and a short bio (50 words max) including your name, email address, degree level and institutional affiliation to: complit.iu@gmail.com (both in the body of the email and as an attachment) by January 30, 2016.