Strange Labors, Perverse (Re)Productions
Panel for GEMCS (10/14/99)
If contemporary anxieties about cloning, infertility and procreative
technologies expose the unyoking of proper sexuality and the discourse of
reproduction, this panel seeks to explore the relationship between pleasure
and generation, between an action (or word) and its fruits, between
genders/sexualities and their products. Figures of reproduction-conceived
of broadly-offer privileged access to the process by which certain desires,
imperatives and proprieties become naturalized while others remain
excessive, perverse, and, perhaps most damning, banished from the realms of
function and necessity. How do we conceive of reproductive sexualities
organized prior to those currently codified in rhetoric if dismantled in
their realization?
How do metaphors of monstrous births, of strange insemination, or of
perverse parenting function in early modern play, poem, prose, or image?
What forms of textual or theatrical (re)production unsettle? Which are
easily recuperated? How do perverse productions retrospectively revise
notions of pleasure, necessity, origin and generation? How do figures of
abjection and disorder in the realm of reproduction conceal alternate and
unthinkable methods of organizing desires, bodies, or kinship? Can
offspring create or dismantle communities or cultures?
Topics might include (but are by no means limited to):
parthenogenesis; books as children; corrupt transmissions of lineage or
text; insemination; fertility and excess; theatrical productions of textual
variance; male mothering, female fathering; medical discourse and its uses;
plants, gardens and organic sexualities; incestuous generation; duplication
and difference.
All approaches to early modern works welcome.
Deadline for submission: April 10
Please send abstracts, preferably via e-mail or fax to:
Joseph Campana
Department of English
Cornell University
Ithaca NY, 14850
Fax: 607-255-6661
jac81@cornell.edu
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