The Comparative Gender Studies Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), the Southern Modernities Research Group of the University of Pretoria, and the South African Society for General Literary Studies invite submissions for the following conference to be held in South Africa in April 2015.

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> Please feel free to post or circulate. 

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> Many thanks,

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> William J Spurlin

> Professor of English

> Brunel University London

> Chair of the Comparative Gender Studies Committee

>  of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA)

> Section Editor, Postcolonial Text

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> Gendered modernities in motion

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> CFP for a joint conference of the Gender Studies Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), the Southern Modernities Research Group, Gender Research at the University of Pretoria (GR@UP), the South African Society for General Literary Studies (SAVAL) and the Literator Society of South Africa

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> Conference Centre, Hatfield Campus, University of Pretoria, 7-10 April 2015

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> Gendered modernities in motion

> Literary and cultural interrogations of gender and sexuality in a time of more pronounced transnational dialogue

> Gender and sexuality are often the terrains where conceptions of personhood are contested as societies evolve towards variegated responses to modernity. Fresh perspectives on gender and sexuality are needed for a more comprehensive picture of modernities that in contemporary culture are not only in constant motion but also thoroughly fluid. Today the view of a singular modernity is countered by a view that the will to autonomy and mastery associated with modernity is, in fact, much more multidimensional in different parts of the world and at different points in time, and the insertion of gender and/or sexuality into new understandings of modernity becomes the critical site for comparison.

> The increased mobility brought about by technological innovation and the rapid exchange of ideas across the globe lead to the development of new gendered subjectivities, or, conversely, the entrenchment of older conceptions of gender and sexuality. The question is how literary and cultural production are contributing to contemporary thinking about modernity, and, in particular, how gender in literature and culture is giving shape to a modernity (or, indeed, modernities) that can no longer be limited to a singular trajectory rooted in European thought. Instead, contemporary phenomena associated with modernity (e.g. migration, new relations between species and the growing importance of cities) are producing a variety of vernaculars characterised both by hybrids and new zones of signification with pretensions to purity. The conference on “Gendered modernities in motion” invites critical responses from scholars interested in gender, sexuality and queer studies to unpack modernity as it is evolving in different parts of the world.

> Some of the questions related to literature and culture that the conference hopes to address include:

> ·         In what ways is modernity an ongoing phenomenon that conditions/interrogates intersections between race, class, gender and non-human animals?

> ·         How do literature and cultural practice in postcolonial societies and the global South deal with same sex desire in a modernizing world where long established traditions are brought into contact with new queer and other gendered identities?

> ·         How does migration to the more privileged North bring about new responses to variously configured gendered identities, including same sex practices?

> ·         To what extent do rituals of affiliation articulate with gendered practices in a modernising world?

> ·         What is the role of religion, belief and tradition in the formation of modern gendered identities?

> ·         To what extent have gendered urban geographies become the sites where modernities evolve?

> ·         How do gendered modernities articulate with the function of institutions, access to rights and citizenship?

> ·         What is the impact of hybridity on the evolving trajectories of gendered modernities in the North and the South?

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> The conference will articulate with the work of researchers in gender studies at the University of Pretoria (UP) and the Southern Modernities research project (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) based at the Faculty of Humanities of UP, and will welcome contributions from scholars who work in the fields of literature and culture.

> The conference will be preceded by an excursion to the apartheid museum in Johannesburg (http://www.apartheidmuseum.org/) on 6 April 2015 and will be followed by conference presentations on South(ern) African comparisons as outlined below.

> Please submit proposals of 300 words for this section of the conference before 31 January 2015 to the conference committee at the University of Pretoria and Brunel University London by e-mail: [log in to unmask] Proposals will be refereed and the outcome of the refereeing process will be available after 21 February 2015.

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> Conference committee:

> Prof Andries Visagie (University of Pretoria)

> Prof William Spurlin (Brunel University London)

> Dr Martina Vitackova (University of Pretoria)

> Dr Polo Moji (University of Pretoria)

> Prof Hein Viljoen (North-West University)

> Dr Erika Lemmer (University of South Africa)