[ecrea] Call for Papers ACLA 2016- Technologies of Sexuality and Gender

CALL FOR PAPERS
Technologies of Sexuality and Gender
A seminar propoal for ACLA 2016, March 17-20, at Harvard University
Sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association's
Comparative Gender Studies Committee
Abstracts by September 23 and further details at
http://www.acla.org/seminar/technologies-sexuality-and-gender-sponsored-icla-comparative-gender-studies-committee

Intersections of technology and sex, gender, and sexuality evoke myriad
occasions for sexual/gender expression, rebellion, and regulation, as
Donna Haraway elucidates in “The Cyborg Manifesto.” Feminist
techno-utopianism appears in theory, science fiction, and practice, from
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, to Shulamith Firestone, to contemporary
feminist DIY, bio-, and digital hacking. Yet, in /Epistemology of the
Closet/, Eve Sedgwick is “chilled by the breezes of … technological
confidence,” given technologism’s frequent aim of biological and social
control—often by eliminating “undesirables,” as histories of eugenics
and intersections of scientific racism, gender, and sexuality attest.
Technology’s ability to open or close off possibilities of gender and
sexual subjectivity or expression produce tensions between technology as
a “degendering” ideal and historical genderings of technologies. Haraway
successors, such as Karen Barad, reconcile these poles by addressing the
“material-discursive practices” that configure the scientific and the
social as discrete. Instead, such reflections propose that neither
meaning nor matter is passive.

Both queer and regulatory possibilities arise in historical and
contemporary development & use of sex toys and prostheses, and in
fraught intersections of sexuality and gender with the internet and
digital culture. Reproductive technologies participate in forms of
neoimperialism through the use of Western money to restrict reproductive
options in postcolonial nations and to hire marginalized women as
reproductive surrogates. Meanwhile, access to sexual and reproductive
healthcare and technologies remains contested in the West, as efforts to
mobilize fears surrounding fetal stem cell research to defund Planned
Parenthood attest. Access to medical treatments and biomedical
regulatory mechanisms inform technologies of masculinity and femininity
more broadly, notably in relation to passing and gatekeeping for trans*
people. While global disparities in medical access to HIV testing and
treatment are pronounced, the advent of anti-retrovirals and viral load
testing has fundamentally shifted the position of the HIV-positive body
in affluent nations. Nevertheless, recent controversies over PrEP
suggest that the liberatory possibilities of biomedicine are always
already subject to new regulatory discourses and fears.

We welcome comparative explorations of technology’s relationship with
sex, sexuality, and gender in its manifold material and imaginative
iterations from a range of geographic and historical locations. Drawing
from theoretical traditions such as feminist, gender, queer, trans,
critical race, postcolonial, disability, etc., proposed papers might
approach these issues comparatively from disciplines including, but not
limited to, literary, media, digital, legal, (bio)medical, and
sociocultural studies.

Submit an abstract at: http://www.acla.org/node/add/paper?seminar=5214

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