Local and International Gender Studies Events
The Young Sexualities
Interdisciplinary Postgraduate ConferenceCardiff University, 17th September 2012
An exciting opportunity to share emerging research, promote interdisciplinary awareness, discussion, and collaboration, and connect with other postgraduates studying gender and sexuality in youth and childhood.
We are also extremely fortunate to host prominent neuroscientist and author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain, Lise Eliot of the Chicago Medical School of Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine & Sci-ence, who will be giving the keynote address.
The conference will be of interest to postgraduate researchers from a range of disciplines, including the sciences, arts, and social sciences. Potential topics for discussion include, but are not limited to:
Youth sexual heath and sex education
The ‘pornification’ / ‘sexualisation’ of culture and its relation to childhood
Neuroscientific and developmental approaches to debates surrounding gender and sexuality
Young LGBTQ identities and communities
The history and pathologisation of childhood sexuality
International / UK policy and practice concerning relevant issues
Philosophical and theoretical debates concerning power and desire in youth and childhood
Attendance is free for Cardiff University students and £10 for external attendees. Booking will open in July 2012—please contact us for further details or check www.youngsexualities.org for updates.
You can participate in the conference through presenting either:
A 15 minute paper (+ questions)
An A1 / A2 poster (to be displayed throughout the conference)
Multimedia or arts-based presentations or displays (e.g. short films, photography etc)
Please submit abstracts to youngsexualities@gmail.com by the 15th July 2012. Abstracts should be limited to 300 words for papers or multimedia presentations and 200 words for posters.
Queries or further information requests should be made to the above email address.
Forbidden Fruits, Forbidden Histories.
A postgraduate conference exploring LGBT in the Arts and Humanities.
11th July 2012.
Cardiff School of European Studies, Cardiff University, UK.
Call for Papers:
“I always find it sad not to pluck the delicious flower that we shall soon be unable to pluck. For then it would be fruit…and forbidden.”Writing a hurried response to his friend in a classroom of the Lycée Condorcet in 1888, Marcel Proust recognised that his desire for those of the same sex was a forbidden one that went against social, moral and political convention. Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1913 – 27) has been widely recognised as a founding text by and for Queer Studies: whether it be the flamboyant characterisation of the Baron de Charlus or more subtle nuances visible in the narrator’s own curiosity, Proust’s explicit writings on homosexuality paved the way for a more open literary treatment of it. The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed experimentations in subject matter and slowly but surely, representations and portrayals of LGBT became more visible in European Literature and the Arts. At the same time as French authors such as Proust, Gide and Cocteau were transforming the literary canon, so too were their European neighbours, such as Thomas Mann with Tod in Venedig (1912) or Anna Elisabet Weirauch with her Der Skorpion trilogy (1919 – 31); or in Spain, Federico García Lorca with Oda a Salvador Dali (1926) and Luis Cernuda in La realidad y el deseo (1936), creating a much-needed cultural space for LGBT concerns. With the new millennium well underway, LGBT has continued to benefit from equality and diversity legislation together with an increasing and continued social acceptance.
Marcel Proust to Jacques Bizet.Lycée Condorcet, 1888.
Hosted by the Languages, Cultures and Ideologies Research Unit at Cardiff School of European Studies, the Forbidden Fruits, Forbidden Histories conference aims to highlight continuities and change within LGBT themes and motifs across a wide range of European cultural and social practices, seeking to highlight current academic research in, and facilitate discussions on the cultural presence of LGBT in Arts and Humanities research. The conference organisers warmly welcome abstracts for twenty-minute papers. Papers may focus on, but are not restricted to, Literature, Poetry, Visual Arts, Queer Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Topics may include histories of closeting; disguise and revelation; desire and consumption; metaphors of sexuality; sexuality legislation and the arts.
If you feel your research would complement the aims of this conference, please get in touch. An abstract of no more than 300 words should be submitted to Matt Berry (berrymj@cardiff.ac.uk) no later than February 14th 2012 for consideration by the conference’s steering committee.
Assuming Gender Annual Lecture 2011
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| Click to download poster (PDF) |
An Assuming Gender Guest lecture by Professor Rachel Bowlby (University College London)
Wednesday 14 December 2011, 5.15pm
Lecture Theatre 2.01, Humanities Building, Cardiff University, Colum Drive
All welcome
Funded by the University Graduate College and ENCAP
We are delighted to announce that the 2011 Assuming Gender Annual lecture will be given by Professor Rachel Bowlby (University College London), and is entitled 'A Child of One's Own: Parental Stories'.
Rachel Bowlby is Northcliffe Professor of English at UCL. Her books include Just Looking (1985), Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis (1992), Shopping with Freud (1993), Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (2000), and, most recently, Freudian Mythologies: Greek Tragedy and Modern Identities (2007). She has edited Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and two volumes of Woolf’s critical writings, and is also the author of Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (1997). She has translated a number of books by contemporary French philosophers, including Derrida’s Of Hospitality (2000) and Paper Machine (2005). She currently holds a two-year Leverhulme Major Research Award.
Please note that the lecture will begin at 5.15pm.
All welcome.
Abstract:
Parenthood is a neglected topic in comparison with other elemental attachments (the passions of childhood or erotic love). But recent radical changes in typical family forms and in procreative possibilities (new reproductive technologies) expose the mutability and multiplicity of ‘parentalities’, creating new kinds of parental story and new questions about parenthood. Why do people want (or not want) to be parents? How has the ‘choice’ enabled by contraception changed the meaning of parenthood? Today, the positive choice to seek and have a child as a matter of personal fulfillment is accepted as valid for men as well as women, individuals as well as couples. But there are also antecedents to the contemporary orientation, sometimes in classical texts where the parental story has up till now been sidelined. This lecture will look at one example of this phenomenon, Dickens’s Great Expectations.
