Apologies for cross-postings
Call for Papers
Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Washington, D.C.
14-18th April 2010.
Class Intimacies: Emotional Capitalism and the Politics of Sexuality
Organisers: Jon Binnie, Manchester Metropolitan University and Yvette Taylor,
Newcastle University
In recent years we have witnessed a resurgent interest in class politics and
identities in contemporary social theory. Geographers have also shared a
renewed interest in class. This has been reflected in work examining the class
politics of neoliberalism; and the gendered class politics of everyday life. At
the same time, work on the class politics of sexuality (such as Michael
Trask’s ‘Cruising Modernism’) has challenged the marginalisation of class within
queer theory and sexuality studies more generally, where queer subjectivity is
increasingly linked to consumer choices, style-based forms of transgression, or
avant-garde knowledge and participation. It still remains the case that
questions such as poverty and labour remain largely off the research agenda
of sexuality studies, enforcing a separation between the ‘material’ and
the ‘queer’. Traditional economic models of class stratification and mobility
have generally overlooked the intimate and the subjective, representing a
missed opportunity to better understand class itself, which is bound up in
notions of sexual, gender and bodily appropriateness generally, and
heterosexuality specifically, where ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ operates
differently across socioeconomic classes. While class has received renewed
critical attention from human geographers, questions of the intimate and
sexual dimensions of class politics tend to remain under-explored within
contemporary Human Geography. In this session we wish to explore the
relationships between sexuality, intimacy, class and space. In doing so we
take particular inspiration from the work of Eva Ilouz on emotional capitalism,
and Viviana Zelizer on intimacy and economics.
We welcome papers that explore the relationship between class and intimacy
in a wide range of theoretical and empirical perspectives.
Papers could address the following issues:
The relationships between intimacy, class and sexuality in different national
contexts.
Post-colonial perspectives on the class politics of intimacy and sexuality
The class politics of queer theory
The intimate and sexual politics of labour
The class politics of sexual citizenship
The transnational politics of classed intimacies and sexualities
How class is theorized in relation to heterosexuality, heteronormativity and in
non-normative sexualities
Please submit a 250 word abstract to both session organisers, Jon Binnie
[log in to unmask] and Yvette Taylor [log in to unmask] by
Friday 23rd October.
|