Call for Papers: "Cycles" (January 15 Deadline)

The Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Stony Brook University Announces its 3rd Annual Graduate Student Conference

CYCLES
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Stony Brook University’s Manhattan Campus
CALL FOR PAPERS EXTENDED

Please email your 250-word abstract by January 15, 2009 to:

wstconf@gmail.com

Life is shaped by cycles. From patterns of migration and biological processes to the recycling of
ideas and objects in mass culture, forms of re-circulation define our experiences. Cycles explores
reiterations of gender categories, social movements, as well as what it might mean to have a
temporality opposed to a teleological notion of history. This conference provides a critical space to map the terrain of the cycle by approaching it from various theoretical, analytic, and disciplinary positions of feminism. How might this process inform science, visual culture, music, and literature?

Furthermore, can cycles as repetitions help us to negotiate the past by working through the
traumas and mistakes of history? Or are we destined to repeat the past without the possibility of
meaningful change?

This conference aims to generate an interdisciplinary and critical discussion about how gender and sexuality relate to the concept of the cycle. Papers are invited from all disciplines and theoretical positions. Some suggested topics include but are not limited to:

๏ Feminist and/or queer temporalities
๏ Trauma, repetition, and death
๏ Social movements and political change
๏ Technologies of reproduction
๏ Theorizing menstruation in literature and film
๏ Visual or textual strategies of repetition as an aesthetic or cultural politics
๏ The bicycle as an instrument of women’s liberation
๏ Migrations and geo-spatial movements
๏ Cycles of narrative: series, adaptations, remakes

Cycles Conference
wstconf@gmail.com
Women's & Gender Studies Program
Stony Brook University
105 Old Chemistry
Stony Brook, NY 11790-3456