– PLEASE CIRCULATE WIDELY –

The 2nd biennial conference of the Postgraduate Contemporary Women’s Writing Network (PG CWWN)

11th – 12th September 2009

Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Professor Lucie Armitt (University of Salford)

In recent decades, ficiton and critical theory have expanded, re-defined and re-written the body as a representative space, as a subject/ object of textual representation. Contemporary women writers in particular have adopted new ways of engaging with the body, for instance in terms of gender, race and nationality. This postgraduate conference seeks to explore how contemporary women’s writing from the 1970s onwards writes and read bodies in a range of social, political and cultural contexts. We especially encourage submissions on literature of 1990s onwards. Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:

• sex and the body
• (trans)gendered bodies
• racial bodies
• ageing bodies/ the body as memory
• bodies as texts/ texts as bodies
• the body in cyperspace
• diasporic bodies
• politicising the body
• queer bodies
• staging the body (performance and gaze)

Please email abstracts of no more than 300 words for 20-minute papers to the organisers at bodies2009@ell.ox.ac.uk by 27th March 2009. If you have any questions regarding this event, would like to express your interest or be put on our mailing list, please get in touch via email or visit one of the following links:
PG CWWN Facebook Group
http://www.new.facebook.com/group.php?gid=34468732135&ref=ts
PG CWWN Website (currently under construction)
http://www.cwwn.org.uk/index.php?q=postgraduate.html