[UPDATE/REMINDER] CFP on the Virus | cfp.english.upenn.edu

[UPDATE/REMINDER] CFP on the Virus | cfp.english.upenn.edu

[QSTUDY-L] CfP: Bodies in Movement: Intersecting Discourses of Materiality in the Sciences and the Arts

[QSTUDY-L] CfP: Bodies in Movement: Intersecting Discourses of Materiality in the Sciences and the Arts

(In)Visible Subjects: Bodies, Spaces, Disciplines | cfp.english.upenn.edu

(In)Visible Subjects: Bodies, Spaces, Disciplines | cfp.english.upenn.edu

RGS-IBG 2011 Annual Conference, London, UK, 31 August – 2 September 2011 Session Call For Papers: (Re)Imagining Materiality

RGS-IBG 2011 Annual Conference, London, UK, 31 August – 2 September 2011 Session Call For Papers: (Re)Imagining Materiality

Documentary as body genreDocumentary as body genre: CfP Visible Evidence 18, August 11-14, 2011, NYU

Documentary as body genreDocumentary as body genre: CfP Visible Evidence 18, August 11-14, 2011, NYU

Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and Moving Image [http://www.fcsh.unl.pt/revistas/cjpmi] | cfp.english.upenn.edu

Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and Moving Image [http://www.fcsh.unl.pt/revistas/cjpmi] | cfp.english.upenn.edu

Documentary and Space, Media Fields Journal Issue 3, February 15, 2011 | cfp.english.upenn.edu

Documentary and Space, Media Fields Journal Issue 3, February 15, 2011 | cfp.english.upenn.edu

The New York Public Library: Sex, Drugs and The History of an Epidemic

The New York Public Library: Sex, Drugs and The History of an Epidemic

Some Advice on Getting a lot of (hopefully good!) Academic Writing Done (and some advice on dissertations at the end) . . . « Networkologies

Some Advice on Getting a lot of (hopefully good!) Academic Writing Done (and some advice on dissertations at the end) . . . « Networkologies

Beyond McLuhan: Your New Media Studies Syllabus - Christina Dunbar-Hester - Technology - The Atlantic

Beyond McLuhan: Your New Media Studies Syllabus - Christina Dunbar-Hester - Technology - The Atlantic

In Professor-Dominatrix Scandal, U. of New Mexico Feels the Pain - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education

In Professor-Dominatrix Scandal, U. of New Mexico Feels the Pain - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Poetics of Metadata (proposals due October 10, 2010; STS conference March 16-18, 2011
) | cfp.english.upenn.edu

The Poetics of Metadata (proposals due October 10, 2010; STS conference March 16-18, 2011
) | cfp.english.upenn.edu

Re-animating Cyborgs

When I first read Donna Haraway's A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s, I was alienated on several fronts, not the least being my relative naivete, couple with a white skin and male genitalia.  What could I glean from a text that seemed to be a call-to-arms against everything my body represented/embodied, and 15 years too late to boot?  History had assured us that the essay was a relic: a memento of an era in academia before the balkanization of the humanities in the early 1990's in response to the vein of identity politics in which this work seemed a seminal work, despite the inherent critique of such divisions in Haraway's text.  Reading the piece now, in the nowness of ubiquitous, parallel computing, bio-data targeted marketing, and liquid sexuality, Haraway's polemic seems not only frightfully relevant and astute, but, dare I say it, inspiring.  She calls for renewed alliances, between feminisms, races and sexualities in the face of technologized social life that would reduce difference to numerical data.  Already, in 1985, she sees the fertile linkages between animal and machine, the erasure of boundaries separating public and private, the destabilization of gender and sexual "identities" that have always been fictions, bestowed on others from above so we could feel a part of some community.  Instead of holing ourselves into our individual departments, (also the internecine turf wars that wage within disciplines-the endemic ones I consistently see in Media Studies being between those allied to social science, history or theory)-we must look out across the campus, to the so-called "hard" sciences that are building the infrastructures that we do and will inhabit, as well as groups that have been partitioned (the various so-called area studies of ethnicity, race, gender and sexuality; as well as art history, communication, sociology, philosophy, engineering, biology) and forge affinities with those that are not only working toward the same kind of revolutionary politics that we envision, but also the opening of spaces that foster dialogue with and through the same machines that many would disavow or ignore.  The question is not an either/or-bodies or technology, male or female, public or private, straight or gay, fiction or reality-but nor is it a flaccid fusion of the two-it's the problem of thinking the "both/and" and producing/experimenting within polyvalent fields where miscommunication and contradiction are frequent and fertile, not dead-ends or failures.  The anxieties of originality can be overcome by cross-fertilizations, collective intelligence and modular thinking. 

Some quotes:

"Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction." (8)

"Sexual reproduction is one kind of reproductive strategy among many, with costs and benefits as a function of the system environment" (21).

"Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between man and machine, each concieved as coding devices, in an intimacy and with a power that ws not generated in the history of sexuality" (8).

-notion of affinity-"(Affinity: related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another, avidity)" (13).

"Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism" (14).

"Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism" (34).

Becoming Data

This trend toward controlling space-time, bodies and desire is leading to a homogenous culture of individuals determined to homogenize themselves into data that the network can easily communicate to other nodes. Can we still experiment and transform within the network/database? I'm wondering if we can use mis/non-communication to create new lines of flight. I'm working on a piece that explores issues of mastery and submission and the potential for creating the new/different via network technologies. Is there an algorithm of desire?

CFP's-2/3/10

"GENERATING BODIES: DISCURSIVE SEXED PRODUCTIONS”
full name / name of organization:
Body and Textuality Research Group, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain)
contact email:
cg.lostextosdelcuerpo@uab.es
cfp categories:
gender_studies_and_sexuality
In the 21st century, the body is all but a certainty, and raises endless questions.
How do we live in the body that we are / we have? How does it represent us, and to what extent? How does it become readable, understandable? What does it tell? What can it say and what can’t it say? Who or what does it say from? How can I get involved in what the body I am /I have says or represents ? Does my body belong to me or do I belong to it? Is this a relationship of belonging, or rather of participation without belonging? Which is the power of my body? What are the categories that hide or reveal it? What is the body?

These questions invite us to think about the relationship between our body, the discourses that constitute it, and the texts that have materialized it along with its socio-political potential. None of them, however, runs outside the articulation of sexes, genders and sexualities.
This time, the second conference “The texts of the body” will focus on the generation of bodies (and their regeneration and degeneration), understanding that these "attributes" --sex, gender and sexuality-- are inseparable from the materialization of bodies, of their own becoming bodies.

The conference, then, is structured as an interdisciplinary meeting to reflect and debate on the body as a gendered and sexualized cultural issue.

Suggested topics:
* Body and literature: the body as text, the body as a literary theme ...
* Body, culture and anthropology: customs, rituals, fashion, media, popular culture ...
* Body and mind: language, theology, scientific discourse ...
* Body and rules: deviated body, transsexuality, transgenderism, monstrosity ...
* Body and technology: artificiality, cyberbody, surgery, bodybuilding ...
* Body, science and medicine: knowledge, vision, look ...

The official conference languages will be Catalan, Spanish, and English. Communications will also be welcome in Galician, Portuguese, French, and Italian.

The full text of the communications should not exceed 2,500 words, excluding references. The maximum time for each presentation is 20 minutes.

Accepted papers will be subject to assessment by an expert committee which will select them to be published in thematic volumes of the collection Bodies that Matter. The publication rules, deadlines, etc. will be forwarded to interested people in due course.

Interested individuals must submit by email, before June 1, 2010, an abstract of 150 to 300 words summarizing the content of their communication and a list of keywords. They must also
provide the contact details: participant's full name, institution to which s/he belongs and e-mail address.
The Scientific Committee will notify acceptance of the proposed communication from September 1, 2010.
The registration fees are:
• Participants with communication: 90 Euros
• Attendees without communication: 25 Euros
E-mail contact: cg.lostextosdelcuerpo@uab.es
Body and Textuality Research Group
http://cositextualitat.uab.cat
Coordination: Dr. Meri Torras
Faculty of Philosophy and Letters
Autonomous University of Barcelona
08193 Bellaterra (Cerdanyola del Vallès)
Spain

By web submission at 01/21/2010 - 15:56

Language inscribed onto bodies.

Here is an interesting article in the Times about how the body literally translates abstract (linguistic) stimuli.