[ecrea] cfp: Fifty Shades of Grey: An Inquiry into ‘Dangerous Things’

PLEASE NOTE EXTENSION TO DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS.


Fifty Shades of Grey: An Inquiry into ‘Dangerous Things’.

University of Brighton

School of Humanities

April 3rd/4th, 2013. [note change of date]



http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/dangerous-things





… [T]he sexualisation of culture from the ‘pornosphere’ to the public 
sphere has included with it a democratisation and diversification of 
sexual discourse. The commodified cultures of advanced capitalist 
societies have come to function as spaces for the articulation and 
dissemination of diverse sexual identities and radical sexual politics.

Brian McNair (2002) Striptease Culture: Sex, Media, and the 
Democratisation of Desire.







When sexuality turns female, we find it still enmeshed in semantics 
linking women, fire and dangerous things.

G Lakoff (1987) Women, Fire and Dangerous Things.





This two-day inter-disciplinary conference will bring together a number 
of critical conversations opened up by the commercial and popular 
success of the trilogy of stories which started with Fifty Shades of 
Grey (2011). We will look in particular at the histories and meanings 
of:  the eroticised narrative of the romance, and by the conservative 
romancing of erotica; by the novel technologies the trilogy both used 
and departed from; and by those critical responses which found the text 
wanting in feminism, ‘authentic’ representations of BDSM, and/or 
literary ‘taste’.





Creating and working from a close reading of the narrative dynamics of 
the trilogy and other examples of such fiction (as text or on the 
screen), we will discuss the ways in which representations of female 
sexuality in contemporary erotic and/or romantic fiction  reproduce or 
depart from the dominant tropes of such fiction in the nineteenth and 
twentieth centuries. The consequent alignments or departures will be 
explored as ways of enquiring into the current state of feminism, gender 
hierarchies, female desire and popular culture.





At the motivating core of this conference is a need to re-engage with 
questions about feminism, post-feminism, and  anti-feminism in the 
fields of past and present popular culture. To do so, we will, inter 
alia, interrogate the popularity of E.L. James’s texts amongst millions 
of women readers.  These texts knit together the long narrative romance 
tradition of women-as-‘fixer’-of-broken-male (from Jane Eyre, North and 
South to the works of Barbara Cartland and the texts which inhabit the 
categories of Mills and Boon), with the historically more recent yet 
powerful narratives of erotic fiction which think of themselves as being 
written  ‘for women’. As such, the trilogy is perfectly placed to allow 
us begin a broad and deep exploration of the contradictory conservatism 
of much popular culture when it comes to the representation and 
interpretation of female sexual desire.



It will be our contention that the success of the trilogy, and the 
ideological intensity invested in the various responses both to the 
texts and to their popularity, speak to larger or wider concerns in 
contemporary Western cultures – concerns about sexual politics, about 
how to preserve the authenticity and autonomy of sub- or counter- sexual 
cultures, and concerns too about cultural value or ‘taste’ in the realms 
of gendered spaces.



Hence we invite papers which turn on or engage with the following themes:



Fifty Shades of Grey and the History/Histories of Erotic Fiction for Women.



Feminism and Romance narratives/Feminism and Erotic Narratives.



Representations of Sadomasochistic Sexuality and Narratives of Gender 
and Power.



Sexual Subcultures in the ‘mainstream’.



Fifty Shades of Grey and the Re-Privatisation of Reading – the 
Technological Conditions of ‘Reading without Shame’.



Sex and Fiction: the Politics of Popularity.





New Technologies, Gender and the ‘Democratisation’ of Pornography





The Repositioning of Reading as Writing -   ‘Fan Fiction’ as an Emergent 
Genre?





Pornography, Pleasure and Politics in the realm of the ‘feminine’.





Historicising Sexual Desire: Transgression, Submission and Conformity in 
Popular

Fiction.







Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to 
(dangerousthings /at/ brighton.ac.uk) before the 28th of January, 2013.





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