-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Reminder: "Contaminating Bodies, Infectious Displays: Women as
Performative Currency": ASTR Working Session CFP
Date: Fri, 27 May 2011 14:52:05 -0400
From: jill stevenson <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: PERFORM - Medieval Performing Arts
<[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
*“Contaminating Bodies, Infectious Displays: Women as Performative
Currency”*
*Working Session Call for Papers*
*ASTR/TLA 2011 Conference*
*Montreal, November 2011***
Anna Gibbs writes: “Contagion is everywhere in the contemporary world.
It leaps from body to body, sweeping through mediatized populations at
the speed of a bushfire…. Consumer economies actually rely on contagion
for everyday functioning, connecting people, money, goods, resources,
ideas, and beliefs in global flows of communication and exchange in ways
that fundamentally alter relations in the process.”
Female bodies often substitute for currency within economies—marriage
and childbearing practices throughout history offering just one example.
In some instances, this substitution empowers the female body with
strategic identity or influence. However, such commodification can also
serve to control what the female body can do, where it can travel, and
how it can participate in public spheres or contribute to society and
culture.
This working session builds upon, and invites new voices into, the
conversation begun during the 2010 ASTR session, “Contaminating Bodies:
The Threat of Women on Performative Display.” That session considered
the issue of contamination and the female performative body broadly, and
our discussion challenged us to consider how issues of pleasure,
popularity, production, circulation, media, and visuality contribute to
notions of the female body as “contaminating” or, in a potentially more
neutral or positive shift, “infectious.”
This 2011 working session reorients that conversation through the lens
of performative currency in order to explore how the female body as a
contaminating force participates in the circulation and exchange of
power, identities, affect, resistance, pleasure, heritage, religious
belief, popularity, and other currencies. Do particular cultural and
social economies position the performatively displayed female body as
able to “infect” audiences—both positively and negatively? Does the
performative female body have power not only to spread contagion, but
also to defend audiences from contagion—in effect, to inoculate
audiences against cultural, political, or social threats? Following
Gibbs, do specific economies and modes of communication demand that the
female body serve as a contagion? And how might performance fulfill,
perpetuate, or benefit from that demand?
Although we encourage members of our 2010 working session to submit
proposals, our aim is to incorporate new voices and perspectives into
this conversation. We invite work from a range of historical periods,
geographies, and theoretical frameworks.
We will organize participants into smaller working groups that encourage
dialogue across disciplinary, theoretical, and historical boundaries.
Members of these smaller groups will share project ideas, challenges,
and resources by email before the conference. In early October,
participants will exchange short papers (8-10 pages) within these
smaller groups. Each participant will prepare brief written feedback
about the other members’ papers, which they will exchange and discuss at
the beginning of the conference session. We will follow this small group
work with a larger conversation about conclusions and connections that
emerged from this discussion, and possibilities for further study.
*Please submit a 200-word abstract and brief bio to _both_ Jen-Scott
Mobley ([log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>) _and_ Jill
Stevenson ([log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>) by
Monday, May 30^th .*Feel free to email Jen-Scott or Jill with questions.
For information about Working Session guidelines or the conference,
please visit: http://www.astr.org/conference/working-sessions-guidelines
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