Call for Papers:


Gender Forum: Off Centre: Eccentricity and Gender
(Guest editors Prof. Dr. Ingrid Hotz-Davies (English Department)
Prof. Dr. Stefanie Gropper (Department for Scandinavian Studies)
University of Tübingen)


For a special issue of gender forum, submissions addressing questions of
gender and eccentricity are invited.



The marginal, the liminal, the subordinate, the peripheral, the fringe:
contemporary theories and practices of literary and cultural studies know
many terms by which areas which appear outside a given or assumed centre –
of social or political power, of normativity, of definition – may be named,
discussed, given a voice. But these terms tend to be curiously static,
describing fixed positions which appear, despite the turbulent and
conflicted nature of these allocations, pre-given sites rather than options
of choice, spaces for experimentation or techniques of interrogation.


The editors of the proposed special issue of Gender Forum believe that one
possible and as yet untested way of thinking about those not in the centre
without allocating them a fixed location on the margin, a given identity, a
clear location in a gird of social and cultural interactions would be an
approach which focuses on the eccentric and its cognates, the singular, the
odd, the "off". We see eccentricity as a textual technique in the realm of
literature and as a specific form of performativity in the field of human
behaviours: a technique which is geared towards the establishment of
positions outside a centre – a centre identified by the technique or
performance itself. Its aims may be manifold: the revalidation of a
marginal location as an individual choice, the interrogation of the centre
from a position that is neither located elsewhere nor anticipated by the
choices offered in a centre-periphery binarity, a questioning of the very
dynamic of the centre and its outside. In every case, it will be a
technique of self-positioning which seeks out, strains towards an option
beyond the mutually constitutive locations of centre and periphery, centre
and margin, power and subordination.


As yet, the phenomena of the eccentric have been hardly investigated or
researched and are only very sketchily theorized. Off Centre: Eccentricity
and Gender seeks to remedy this by assembling a varied and multifaceted
collection of contributions focusing on any area of literary and cultural
production and / or contributing towards the development of theoretical
tools for thinking the eccentric. Gender as one of the dominant techniques
for the establishment, enforcing and policing of any set of 'centric'
systems of value and signification is here a particularly suitable field of
investigation as we seek to know if the interactions of the centre and its
discontents may be thought as a field of eccentric techniques and
performances.


Possible areas of investigation:
Theories of eccentricity
Gender performativity and eccentricity
The dynamics of the eccentric and its normalization
The commodification or containment of eccentricity
The odd, the singular, the specific as tools of theory and literary practice
Eccentricity and resistance


Deadlines for submissions:
Prof. Dr. Ingrid Hotz-Davies (English Department)
Prof. Dr. Stefanie Gropper (Department for Scandinavian Studies)
University of Tübingen


Submission of 1 to 2-page proposals: 1 February 2009
Submission of finished papers: 1 July 2009


Direct submissions to:
ingrid.hotz-davies_at_uni-tuebingen.de and stefanie.gropper_at_uni-tuebingen.de



-- 
Yemisi Ogunleye
www.iq4news.com

Head of Communications,
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website: http://www.meccsa.org.uk/pgn/

Media & Communications Dept.,
Birmingham City University,
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Birmingham
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