Call for papers
Norlit 2009, Stockholm, 6-9 augusti
Session on Pornography
During the last two or three decades, the long standing notion that
pornography isn’t fit for academic study has been effectively
challenged. Not only has a growing body of increasingly sophisticated
studies on the topic appeared, but the largely condemnatory stance of
the first group of critics to take pornography seriously has by and
large been superceded by critics footed in queer theory as well as
feminism, to whom pornography is simply a cultural discourse among
others. Even so, in many quarters pornography is still looked upon as
a somewhat peripheral phenomenon, at best of tangential interest to
cultural and social studies in general.
This prompts a re-examination of the fundamental issues of the field:
What is pornography? Given that the answer may seem too obvious to
require an explicit formulation – we all judge ourselves capable of
recognizing pornography upon seeing it – it is perhaps not surprizing
that recent critics tend to evade this question. In practice,
however, it has proven surprisingly difficult to come up with a
satisfactory definition of the concept of pornography. Where are we
to draw the line, for instance, between the pornographic and the
erotic? Is there a way of telling sexually explicit art from
pornography proper? Is pornography as a genre inevitably
overdetermined by gender, and if so what are the consequences of
this? What role does pornography play in the evolution of new media?
Should pornography be defined in terms of content, or in terms of the
kind of reading it tends to elicit? And are we to date the birth of
pornography to the nineteenth-century, when the concept as used today
came into practice; to the seventeenth-century, when the first books
that would seem to meet our own criteria for hardcore porn were
published; or to antiquity, from which the term derives?
Regardless of how questions like these are answered, it should be
clear that if our notion of pornography can be delivered from the
view that it must be either good or bad, it can become a powerful
resource for thinking through a vast array of issues of great
importance not only to literary studies, but to society in general.
People who share this conviction, or care to contest it, are invited
to submit paper proposals on any aspect relating to the session’s
theme. Abstracts should be no longer than 1500 signs (including
spaces), and sent to: [log in to unmask] no later than February 28,
2009.
For more information on the conference, see: http://www.norlit.org/
Magnus Ullén, Ph.D., Karlstad University
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