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Dear all,
We'd like to remind you of our CFPs for AAIS 2014 which will be held May 23-25 at the University of Zurich. Please consider sending us an abstract, coming to the conference, and supporting the Queer Studies Caucus. Also, feel free to circulate this to anyone who might find it interesting or relevant to their work. The deadline for submission has been extended to 10 December 2013. If you're interested, or have questions, suggestions or comments, please do feel free to get in touch with SA Smythe (QSC President) and Julia Heim (QSC Secretary) at [log in to unmask]. The full abstracts are below, for the following proposed panels:
- Queer/Italian/Film
- Regulating Queerness in Italy
- Libertini, Sodomiti, Froci and Finocchi: Sexual Identity and the Sex Act
- A Reflection on the present and future of Queer Italian Studies (Roundtable)
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Title: Queer/Italian/Film
Chair: Dom Holdaway, University of Warwick
Taking inspiration from Carla Freccero's Queer/Early/Modern,
this panel attempts to open up new understandings of queer Italian
film that offer a productive challenge to film and media studies.
Papers are welcomed that focus on the spaces between the terms, thus
they might include considerations of the limits of the applicability of
the term 'queer' in the case of Italy's cinema (the
term's translatability, or possible Italian equivalents); the
transcendence of national borders in queer film ('Italian' films not
'made in Italy', such as Mambo Italiano); the modes through which
queer Italian subjects find expression that go beyond
traditional film (camera phones, social media, photography, etc.); the
representation of queer characters by straight actors; or the shifting
spaces of queer aesthetics in traditional Italian cinema.
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Title: Regulating Queerness in Italy
Chair: SA Smythe, University of California, Santa Cruz
One of the frameworks for Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages is the critique of “queer as regulatory,” that is, a controlled or directed expectation of queer identity or expression according to a predefined rule, principle, or law (such as homonormativity and/or secularity). With this framework in mind, this session focuses on those regulations and predefinitions that have been central to shaping the limits of queer Italian identity and have created or prevented forms of interplay between all groups and intersections of those considered to be “others” throughout Italy's social, political, and literary landscape.
Questions addressed in this panel include, but are not limited to:
- Where do identitarian and political categories of Black and Italian meet?
- How do queerness or other non-normative sexual identities and the process of racialization interact in Italy’s current social climate?
- Where and to what end does queer meet the postcolonial?
- How has homonormativity--a decidedly Anglo-American concept--been portrayed or introduced in Italian culture?
- How have answers to these questions changed along with the shifting status of immigration, queer visibility, class difference, and global accessibility to knowledge?
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Title: Libertini, Sodomiti, Froci and Finocchi: Sexual Identity and the Sex Act
Chair: Julia Heim, CUNY Graduate Center
This
panel will discuss portrayals and receptions of LGBT sex acts in Italy.
What role do representations of LGBT sex play in Italian
literature, film, television, politics, and other cultural media? What
is the importance of the physical act in an age when political
correctness can lead to an erasure of difference? Have the intersections
of identity and action promoted or prohibited representations
of queer experience? When considered from a historical perspective, has
a lack of terminology increased or decreased the potential for the
recognition of queerness in Italian society and culture? Papers that
consider all forms of performativity and its relationship
to identity and perceived identity are particularly encouraged.
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Title: A Reflection on the present and future of Queer Italian Studies
This roundtable will focus on the role of queer studies in academia
today, in the United States, in Italy, and in Europe more broadly. How
has queer studies been institutionalized? What is the impact/role of
queer studies in Italian Studies? Scholars interested
in discussing issues concerning the differences and convergences
between Italian queer Italianists, Italian queer studies in the United
States and queers within the Italian and Anglo cultural contexts should
submit short proposals discussing their specific
areas of interest regarding these topics, and include specific
questions they would like to pose to the group more generally.
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