Femininities, Masculinities and the Posthuman The Femininities and Masculinities Project

Femininities, Masculinities and the Posthuman The Femininities and Masculinities Project Saturday 2nd May - Monday 4th May 2015 Dubrovnik, Croatia Call for Presentations: We live in times in which what it means to be human is in a flux. Our identities, including our gender identities, are in the state of becoming and performing themselves. As illustrated in Spike Jonze's film Her (2013), technology has created a situation in which our lived, offline realities and increasingly mediated, shaped and in some cases supplanted by relationships and identities fashioned online. Body enhancements and medical innovations enable us to shape our bodies to the extent unknown before, which is exemplified, for insance, by Nicki Minaj's alleged buttocks augmentation for enhanced femininity. Yet, there is also a trend to look for our inherent nature - our human essence - in the growingly posthuman world. Consequently, the concept of the posthuman is inextricably tied to conceptions of femininity, masculinity and gendered subjects as a whole. At the same time, because this interplay between technologies and bodies takes place against a backdrop of commercial and biotechnological innovation that constantly changes the playing field, fundamental questions about what it means to be posthuman remain open to ongoing debate. This conference seeks to generate dialogues that explore the posthuman by framing it as an opportunity for self-fashioning, performing and communicating gendered identities. We therefore invite proposals for presentations on topics such as: Posthuman (gendered) identities: -human, posthuman, animal -animal/human interactions -automata, cyborgs, monsters, aliens -non-human non-heteronormativity -fetishisation of the posthuman Science, gender and the posthuman: -the medicalization and creation of gender/sex -guidebooks for 'real' men and women -'the homosexual' medical and 'manageable' -neuroscience and the gender of cells and the brain -fashoning identities via medical discourse The bios and posthuman: -bio-politics and its intersection with post-humanism -reinventing bio-politics and the bios -objects and the re-evaluation of the human -the decline of the anthropocentrism Posthuman bodies: -body enhancement -(medical) metamorphoses -transgression of body boundaries -reproducing the posthuman body -embodiment and (gender) identity Posthuman communication and gender: -cyberspace and changing means of communicating -media addiction -digitalisation of social relationships -gendered subjects and virtual reality -digital technologies, cyberspace, and fashioning of gender identities Proposed papers, presentations, workshops and pre-formed panels on issues related to any of the above themes, but by no means limited to them, are welcome in a variety of academic and creative forms. We would like to embrace scientific, theoretical, philosophical, historical or sociological examinations of those themes, as well as in other fields of scholarship and discussions of their representations in literature, film, visual art, music, media, and other aspects of culture. We would like to invite scholars and scientists as well as artists, activists and professionals from a variety of fields. What to Send: 300 word proposals should be submitted by Friday 30th January 2015. All submissions are at least double blind peer reviewed. Proposals should be submitted simultaneously to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word or RTF formats with the following information and in this order: a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in programme, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords. E-mails should be entitled: FM5 Abstract Submission. Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend. Organising Chairs: Barbara Braid and Malwina Degorska: barbara.braid@gmail.com Rob Fisher: fm5@inter-disciplinary.net The conference is part of the Critical Issues programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference must be in English and will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s). All publications from the conference will require editors, to be chosen from interested delegates from the conference. Inter-Disciplinary.Net believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make this commitment, please do not submit an abstract for presentation. For further details of the conference, please visit: http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/gender-and-sexuality/femininity-and-masculinity/call-for-papers/ Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.