Call for papers! Please share if you know anyone whod be interested, and thanks for being part of the great adjunct national chain. Yall rock. Gender and Medieval Materialisms Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship Sponsored Session MLA 2015 Much recent critical work has explored the importance of things, insisting that the non-sentient object is as constitutive of our reality as human meaning-making apparatuses. This turn resists a humanist dualism that insists matter is an inert substance that can be ethically and uncritically imprinted or formed by human wills. The idea that matter is merely the passive stuff to be molded into human--and therefore signifying--forms underpins the view of the environment as natural resources, land as territory, and crafted objects as products for consumption. The critical turn toward the materiality of things attempts to un-write this logic through multiple discourses that bring into focus the material structures, objects and practices that constitute culture, society, and even thought. Some of the discourses that engage this issue include: Postcolonial work on the age of the Anthropocene (the geological epoch in which humans significantly impact ecology and the environment), Ecocriticism, Vital Materialism that sees quasi-agency as a property inherent to all things, Agential Realism, Speculative Realism, Object Oriented Ontology, Thing Theory, Feminist theories of embodiment and cyborg existence, Queer human/non-human affinity or kinship, etc. This panel calls for papers that take up medieval art, literature, or history by way of gender and any of these materialist lenses. We welcome readings, manifestoes, and performances that highlight the gendered materiality of medieval practices of making and living, the material remnants of the past in the present, or the way in which medieval materialisms can be brought to bear upon a postmedieval future. Possible topics include but are not limited to: Gender and Medieval theories of materiality Things in medieval literature Medieval objects as vibrant matter Thing-power in medieval art/literature Contemporary material practices to understand medieval things Material economies of medieval art/literary objects Material ecologies of medieval art/literary objects Medieval bodies as things/medieval things as bodies Embodied practice of art/lit/ritual The Agency of medieval objects The temporality of medieval objects and/or scholars encountering them Queer medieval matters Etc. Please send abstracts of 250 words to medmaterialism@gmail by March 18, 2015
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 15:56:33 +0000