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UCLA CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WOMEN announces

Pleasure, Displeasure, and Ethics

Call for Papers for Plenary Session, Thinking Gender 2014

Conference to be held on Friday, February 7, 2014, UCLA Faculty Center

Is pleasure problematic? This year’s Thinking Gender plenary will feature papers on topics that concern feminist and queer studies in relation to pleasure, displeasure, and ethics. For the past several decades, feminists have engaged debates concerning, for example, pleasure and danger, “guilty pleasures,” and feminism as anti-pleasure. Clearly a contested notion, pleasure poses theoretical, and sometimes practical problems for many feminist academics and scholars. Are there “good” and “bad” forms of pleasure? What kinds of ethical frameworks are relevant to discussions about pleasure? What are the politics of pleasure facing women, girls, and LGBTQ people in the contemporary age? How is pleasure normalized and/or resisted in hetero-patriachies? We would also like to consider the consequences of pleasure, whether in material terms (political, economic, social, industrial), or within the affective-emotional-sensorial realms (happiness, excitement, guilt, shame). We invite scholarship engaging compelling, substantive, and even provocative approaches to this subject. We also welcome intersectional analyses concerning gender, race, sexuality, culture, and/or religion as they factor into pleasurable enterprises and practices.

Possible topics on pleasure and women/gender/sexuality could include: 

o   “girlie” feminism and the embrace of feminine vanity

o   pop culture and generic pleasures in media, literatures, and the arts

o   agency and coercion in pleasure industries, i.e. pornography and sex work

o   sexuality, race, and (neo)colonialism 

o   fetishism (object, race, power, culture)

o   food practices and ethics

o   “post-feminism” and pleasure

o   desire and consumerist consumption 

o   carnal aesthetics in feminist art and media

o   beauty and fashion cultures

o   pleasure, displeasure, and affect

o   trauma and (dis)pleasure

o   pleasure politics and class

Please submit a 250-word abstract, a CV (2 pages maximum), and a brief bibliography (3 to 5 sources) by October 14, 2013 (see submissions guidelines on the website); and an 8 to 10 page draft of your paper by Dec. 1, 2013.  Plenary speakers will receive a complimentary lunch and a waiver of the conference registration fee.

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