Litnet

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

CFP for a conference of the Gender Studies Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) at the University of Pretoria, 9-10 April 2015

Gender and sexuality are often the terrains where conceptions of personhood are contested as societies evolve towards variegated responses to modernity. The question is how comparative studies can insert gender and sexuality in the definition of modernity offered by Jean and John L. Comaroff in Theory From the South. Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa (2012). The Comaroffs approach modernity as “a concept of person as self-actualizing subject, to an ideal of humanity as species-being, to a vision of history as a progressive, man-made construction, to an ideology of improvement through the accumulation of knowledge and technical skill, to the pursuit by means of rational governance, to a restless impulse toward innovation whose very iconoclasm brings a hunger for things eternal.”

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.

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:

• To what extent is the city the site where gendered modernities evolve?
• 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 identities?
• How does migration to the more privileged North bring about new responses to variously configured gendered identities, including same sex practices?
• What is the role of religion in the formation of modern gendered identities?
• In what ways is modernity an ongoing phenomenon that interrogates intersections between race, class, gender and species?

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

The conference will take place at the Conference Centre of the Hatfield campus of the University of Pretoria and will be preceded by an excursion to the apartheid museum in Johannesburg (http://www.apartheidmuseum.org/) on 8 April 2015.

More information about the conference will be published on the website of the Gender Studies Committee of the ICLA:

Please direct all enquiries to:

Conference committee at the University of Pretoria:
Prof Andries Visagie
Dr Martina Vitackova
Dr Polo Moji

Provisional budget in South African Rands (ZAR) for approximately 50 delegates