CFP Networks of Intimacy

Making a Scene:
Networks of Intimacy

A half-day afternoon symposium to meet, discuss your own research and
make connections with others interested in intimacy, its practices,
representation and theorisation. This event aims to be cross-disciplinary,
informal, and centred around the potential to foster collaborations and
knowledge-sharing across different fields, disciplines and institutions.

Scenes of Intimacy

This may include those who are researching: sex; intimate relationalities;
the couple; non-normative living; genres of intimacy; literary intimacy;
conceptualisations of kinship and community; the politics of intimacy;
emotions and affect; intimate professions; intimacy and film; censorship;
pornography; violence and intimacy; illness and death; the intimate and the
impersonal; psychoanalysis; philosophies of intimacy.

Participants are invited to address the symposium with a ten minute
description of their research and/or field.

At the end of the day, 6-7 pm, there will be a book launch for the recent collection of
essays, Scenes of Intimacy: Reading, Writing and Theorizing Contemporary Literature.

Friday 19th July, 2013, 1.30 pm – 7 pm

The Institute for Psychoanalysis,

Maida Vale, London.

Advance registration is essential.

Price: £7.50, payable on the day.

Includes afternoon tea/coffee & biscuits & wine at the
launch.

To register or for more information, please contact:

Dr Jennifer Cooke, Lecturer in English,

Department of English and Drama,

Loughborough University.

If you wish to give a paper/talk then please provide a 150
word max. description of your field and research/work
and a 50 word max. biography.

writingsofintimacy@lboro.ac.uk

CFP: Private Lives, Intimate Readings: University of Tartu (Estonia): 11–12 June 2013

Call for Papers

Private Lives, Intimate Readings

Estonian Literary Museum,
Institute of Cultural Research and Fine Arts, University of Tartu
11–12 June 2013, Estonian Literary Museum

Keynote speakers: Prof. Jeremy Popkin and Dr. Paul Arthur

It can be argued that critical engagement with the private and the
intimate has always been a key characteristic of life writing studies.
Whether highlighting different contexts and intentions of different
modes and practices of life writing, where what is deeply personal is
also intensely political or focusing on the ‘structuring of the
private’, life writing studies have made a noteworthy contribution to
contemporary reconceptualizations of the private and the public
spheres. Based on recent development of theoretical perceptions of the
field of life writing, informed by, for example, research into one’s
own family history, archival and oral history work as well as
investigation of web-based life writing environments that have created
new sites of interrogation of the private and the public, of the
intimate and the official and formal, the conference aims at
facilitating a discussion of the methodologies of the intimate and the
ethics of the private. Questions to be considered include, but are not
limited to, the following range of issues:

- The founding assumptions that fuel inquiry of an intensely private
and intimate nature, and the transformation of the initial agenda in
the course of the inquiry;
- The relational dynamics of the process, the question of ties built
(and severed) as well as the contexts and media via which they are
facilitated, the interrelationship of private/individual memory and
cultural history;
- Ways of dealing with and interrelating different artifacts of
memory, the process of ‘sorting out’ (family) memory evidence, the
weight of material evidence, the “concrete reality of a document” (N.
K. Miller, C. Kraus);
- The dynamics of the private and the public in archival and oral
history work and the process of compilation of and publicizing
archival resources;
- The dynamics of private and public documents, the process of
personalization of the public and the official and other acts of
translation (in figurative and literal sense) and interpretation
(concerning, e.g., a range of languages, cultural contexts, time
periods, political regimes, and ideologies);
- Ways of accounting for the absences of concrete realities, the
frequent gap and discord between place as a geographical entity today
and its memorial implications with regard to lost and destroyed
realities (M.Hirsch and L.Spitzer);
- The “intergenerational acts of transfer” (M. Hirsch) such inquiry
often involves on different levels, the second-generation’s
responsibilities to its received memories (E. Hoffmann), questions of
postmemory (M. Hirsch) and of post-postmemory;
- The memorial aesthetic and the aesthetic and ethics of
representation of intimate memory, capacities of different
representational modes and artistic media for accounting for the
intimate.

Please send a 300-word abstract and an approx. 200 word bio to Leena
Kurvet-Käosaar (lkk [at] ut [dot] ee).
Deadline: April 15, 2013.

CFP Gender and Sexuality in Popular Culture

http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=201625

EUPOP 2013 – PCA Europe Annual Conference
University of Turku
31 July – 2 August 2013

Strand: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Culture
CFP Deadline: 25 March 2013

Individual paper and panel contributions are invited for a special thematic strand on gender and sexuality in popular culture at the second yearly international conference of the European Popular Culture Association (EPCA), organised with the Popular Culture Association Finland (PCA-Finland) and the International Institute for Popular Culture, IIPC.
We invite papers exploring any aspect of gender and sexuality in any form of European popular culture, including but not limited to:
• Queerness in popular culture
• Transgenderism in popular culture
• Sexualisation in popular media
• The body in popular culture
• Historical approaches to popular gender and sexuality
• Masculinity in popular culture
• European sex media
• Sex education in popular culture
• Sexuality, gender and technology
• Representations of gender, sexuality and health in popular culture
• Religious approaches to gender and sexuality
• Gender, sexuality and race/ethnicity
• Sexuality on the internet
• Feminism in/and popular culture
• Gender, sexuality and language
• Gender, sexuality and power

The closing date for this call is 25 March 2013. Please submit 250 word paper or panel proposals to: amy.burge@york.ac.uk or c.jenkins@bathspa.ac.uk.

There will be opportunities for networking, publishing and developing caucus groups within the EPCA. Presenters at EUPOP 2013 will be encouraged to develop their papers for publication in a number of Intellect journals, including the Journal of European Popular Culture, the journal of the EPCA. Journal editors will be working closely with strand convenors – a full list of Intellect journals is available at: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/index/. General enquiries about the conference should be directed to: kakallio@utu.fi.

Review: Europe and Love in Cinema

Europe and Love in Cinema

Luisa PASSERINI, Jo LABANYI & Karen DIEHL (eds)

Intellect Ltd., 2012, ISBN 978-1-84150-379-0

£19.95 (pbk), 281 pp.

This interdisciplinary volume is positioned at the interface of cultural history and film studies and departs from the assumption that cinema and the analysis of films is a particularly useful field for the study of the cultural imaginary of specific societies at specific historical moments. The editors on the one hand state that the aim of the collection is to “explore the cultural implications of the treatment of love in a number of European fiction films” (p. 3), on the other hand, they intend an exploration of the “triangulation of the concepts of ‘Europe, ‘love’ and ‘cinema’” (p. 4). A main point of departure for bringing together these three concepts is the assumption that the concept of ‘romantic love’ is one of the main characteristics of Europeanness. In their introduction the editors show how this concept has evolved over time and how, in this way, private feelings have always had public consequences.

The assumption that cinema has played “a crucial role in conjugating the relationship between Europe and love” (p. 11) is the basis for the following eleven chapters which explore the triangular relationship between Europe, love and cinema by applying an adapted version of Ernesto de Martino’s critical ethnocentrism, attempting to criticize Eurocentrism from within. The single contributions are not restricted to heterosexual concepts of romantic love and they furthermore go beyond the concept of romantic love in order to include also aspects such as friendship or attachment to place.

The volume is structured in four parts, each consisting of three chapters. It starts with ‘disciplinary and historical contexts’, continues with ‘impossible loves’ and ‘movements in time-space’ in order to end with ‘cultural re-inscriptions’. In this way, the first three chapters give the disciplinary, historical and theoretical context for the case studies which are to follow.

As anticipated in the volume’s introduction, very different kinds of ‘love’ are discussed in the various chapters. Thus, besides the love for the cinema, the common saying of ‘love at first sight’ is transformed to “first looks” (p. 246) explored by Karen Diehl. Seán Allen examines the love between mother and son in Good Bye, Lenin! (2003). And one part of the volume is dedicated to ‘impossible loves’, i.e. unfulfilled love stories, mainly set in colonial contexts. At times, however, the chapters’ focus is rather on two sides of the triangle, i.e. the authors concentrate for example either on film and love or on film and Europe. Still, conclusions to almost every chapter enable the reader to bring together the individual approaches and link them with the broader scope of the volume.

The volume will be useful to students and scholars of film studies, of European studies and of cultural history interested in any side of the triangle. Furthermore, it could become a starting point for the exploration of ‘love’ and ‘Europe’ also in other media.

Sandra Vlasta

Austrian Academy of Sciences, Research project “Literature on the Move”

Vienna, Austria

Desire and long term relationships

Reblogged from Rewriting The Rules:

Esther Perel did a great TED talk for Valentine's Day this year on sex and desire in long term relationships. Much food for thought.

Virtual Love

Reblogged from Sociology of Emotions:

‘And when I knew… when I realized… it was too late. My life was broken. I was in love.’ (Anna, 39, comemo3’s translation from Catalan)

An interviewee used these words to tell us about her love story with a work colleague who lived miles away, and with whom she had started to chat and exchange emails on a regular basis. Those messages that had once been plain work messages turned slowly and half unconsciously into more and more private emails in which both parties seductively exposed themselves, letting more and more personal issues, fears, hopes, experiences and desires come to the foreground.

Read more… 636 more words

As it says on the tin: a note on "virtual" love.

Love and other Demons in the Age of the Internet

Reblogged from Sociology of Emotions:

On Thursday 26 May, we have started a cycle of conferences with the title: "Taming digital technologies" in the Centre of Contemporary Culture of Valencia (Center October) (http://www.octubre.cat/activ_cat.php?id_categoria=3).

The first presentation, " Love and other demons in the Age of the Internet", by Francisco Nunez, focused on some of the changes experienced by people in love during the last decades.

Read more… 481 more words

Some thoughts on Illouz and Giddens.