Call for Papers: Gender agendas, including transvestites, transsexuals,
the transgendered and queering.

Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta, Northern Cyprus.

The sixth annual Literature and Humanities Conference will be held at
Eastern Mediterranean University as part of  Inscriptions in the Sand, an
Arts and Culture festival taking place at the university and environs
between May 30th and June 1st 2003.  In conjunction with a wide selection of
music, performance and film events, discussion- friendly papers are being
solicited for our symposium.  Although we will be publishing selected
presentations from Inscriptions in the Sand, we encourage participants to
move away from the standard prewritten, "finished paper" format, towards a
more open-ended presentation, which will provoke and contribute to a genuine
exchange of research and ideas during the panel sessions. Our aim is to
create a forum and publishing venue for inspiring work in progress, where
the exchange of ideas with fellow academics participating in the conference
will contribute to the final form of participants' work.

With this in mind, we invite papers and/or presentations that examine the
current status of critical thinking on gender agendas, including
transvestites, transsexuals, the transgendered and queering.  Of particular
interest are presentations which consider these agendas as cultural and/or
political sites for interrogating hegemonic discourses. Possible topics
might include but are not limited to:


-           faith and healing in queer literature
-           transgendered television characters
-           queer cultures in cyberspace
-           equations between gender and technologies
-           pleasure, play and pain: the poetics of sado-masochism
-           trans-feminism
-           medical ethics and transsexuals
-           the sex industry and the future of the female image
-           "Barbie" and Teletubbies
-           class, race and sex
-           issues of gender, sexuality, and The Jerry Springer Show
-           drag queens/drag kings in the desert
-           queer theory: subversive or canonical?
-           queering psychoanalysis
-           the legacy of Jean Genet
-           gendered gazes: Laura Mulvey, Norman Bryson, Judith Butler.
-           gender and legal theory
-           gendering religion
-           nature/nurture and societal norms
-           military machismo and the female soldier
-           Anglo-American vs. French feminisms
-           Bowie, music and androgyny
-           Michel Foucault's archaeologies of sexuality


Please send 250 word abstracts by 30 October 2002 to
[log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]
and please visit http://www.emu.edu.tr/elh/index_confer.html for more
information