Call for Papers
ACLA Seminar: Gender in Local Cinema: Theories and Practices of Spectatorship
ACLA Annual Meeting, March 26-29 2009
Cambridge, MA
Seminar Description:
Local, non-Western cinemas played little role in the development of
the major theories of
spectatorship of the sixties and seventies, theories which remain
influential even as increasing
attention is paid to non-Western and alternative practices that often
challenge or contradict the
basic premises of the Euro-centric theoretical canon. Discussions on
cinematic representation of
gender and sexuality typically draw on psychoanalytically informed
concepts originating in those
decades. Nonetheless, since the eighties these apparatic theories have
been complicated by a
growing corpus of scholarship on postcolonial, queer, and
transnational spectatorship. With the
cultural studies turn within film studies, extra-textual
spectatorship/reception has been
increasingly recognized as multiple, fragmented, and
culturally-historically inflected in later
theorizations of spectatorship (Diawara, Neale, Naficy).
This seminar will examine the relation between modes of spectatorship
and the social context
within which they operate, focusing on the role of cinema in the
construction of gender and
sexuality within its specific cultural context(s) of production and
reception. While we welcome
discussions of any "local" context (including Western and diasporic
communities), we are
especially interested in studies that go beyond a simple opposition to
the Western paradigm of
spectatorship. Building upon the work of post-apparatic feminist
theorists such as bell hooks,
Ella Shohat, Jigna Desai, we would like to examine social contexts
where cinema has a different
function in the construction of gender/sexuality. How do the varying
social functions of the
medium affect its role in the inculcation or destabilization of gender
roles; the affirmation or
subversion of normative sexualities? How do the forms of pleasure in a
particular practice of
spectatorship modify its relation to the construction of gender and sexuality?
Please submit 250 word abstracts no later than November 3rd through
the ACLA website:
http://www.acla.org/submit/
If you have any questions, please contact Polina Kroik (pkroik at
uci.edu) or Soumitree Gupta
(soumitree.gupta at gmail.com).
--
Ogunleye, Yemisi (Miss)
www.iq4news.com
Head of Communications,
MeCCSA Post-Graduate Network
website: http://www.meccsa.org.uk/pgn/
Media & Communications Dept.,
Birmingham City University,
City North Campus,
Birmingham
B42 2SU
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