Our panel will focus on literary, visual, and other cultural productions as acts of memory and memorialization that code and recode conceptions of gender and sexuality. We invite submissions that explore the active role of texts, objects, archives, performances, and practices in engaging with, refusing, contesting, and/or exceeding the categories of gender and sexuality as they impart and commemorate memories, histories, and events. Panel submissions are welcome to explore questions such as: In what ways do literary and cultural productions both represent and actively confront challenges posed by established modes of recording, documenting, and archiving that work to reinforce understandings of gender and sexuality, as well as sexual practices? How do they imagine or enact alternatives? How do memorializing acts exceed linear chronology, refuse Western epistemological frameworks and nationalist hagiographies, and instead, privilege the everyday, gesture toward absences and gaps, or alternatively, highlight rich sources of memory? To what extent do the texts queer and/or decolonize memory, time, history, and space? To what extent do they exceed such analytics?
Please submit 250 word abstracts to cjcynn@vcu.edu and dorothy.atuhura@gmail.com before 5 PM, March 11, 2024.
