Post conference

POSTFEMINIST POSTMORTEMS? GENDER, SEXUALITIES AND MULTIPLE MODERNITIES
Annual Conference of the Department of English, Delhi University, India
February 14-16, 2011

Feminisms and modernities have had a long and interlocked history. Now that we are, arguably, in a post-feminist, post-modern era, is it a fitting moment to stop and take stock of this critical encounter?

This provocation emerges out of a particular trajectory of debates, controversies and confrontations in gender studies over the past two decades. Judith Butler?s Gender Trouble (1990) destabilised understandings of these interlocked categories about two decades after feminism emerged as a serious tool of critical inquiry. In 1990, also, Gayatri Spivak in The Postcolonial Critic re-located critical feminisms outside the Anglophone world.

As a result of such foundational interventions, gender and modernities have encountered each other in and across unlikely cultural geographies, and have produced unforeseen critical progeny. Recent developments, in particular, dislocate any universalist assumption behind such mercurial categories, and allow us to re-conceptualize both gender and modernities across multiple spatial coordinates spanning innovative understandings of postcolonial feminisms, queer studies, performance/film studies, legal studies and so forth. Following on leads offered by such significant scholarship in these areas, this conference in the 21st century will look for fresh evaluations of modernities and gender across the arts and social sciences. The conference will seek to understand the complex interactions of gender/sexualities with a large array of social identifications including race, class, nation and caste within the framework of modernities across literatures, cinema, art, music, dance, photography and theatre in western as well as in post/neo/colonial sites.

Possible topics may include but are not restricted to:
* Literary modernity and gendered politics
* Sexualities and contemporary modernities
* Queer politics and cultural tropes
* Postfeminist interventions and contemporary frames of knowledge
* Reframing political thought and gendered citizenship
* The gendered subaltern and modern historiographies
* Gender, sexualities, and everyday life
* Postfeminist geographies and locational politics
* Metropolitan modernities and feminist interventions
* Gender, sexualities and contemporary visual cultures
* Genres of modernity
* Postsecular interrogations
* Consuming modernities and public/private spaces
* Performing gender and modernities
* Gender and science/technology
* Sexual minorities and contemporary legal discourses
* Class, caste and gendered politics
* Islam, the veil and the West
* Gender and development/environment
* Radical queernesses
* Violence, sexuality and power
* The desiring/desired body
* Affective modernities

Please send your abstract (300 words) and a brief bionote (150 words) to the following email or postal address by October 31, 2010:

DUgendermodernitiesconf@gmail.com

DU Gender & Modernities Conference 2011
Department of English
Delhi University
Delhi - 110007