Recent theory has thoroughly critiqued traditional ways of imag(in)ing sex/gender and sexuality, challenging its tendency to render invisible those ways of being in the world which undermine such normative structures. Such critiques have developed sophisticated ways of understanding embodiment and its representation, investigating perception/s, issues of visibility and visuality, and the effects on the lived experiences of those both within and without the norm: the effects of sexed imaginaries shape the experiences of the unusual and anomalous, and the everyday and conventional. This conference, the 5th international Somatechnics conference, takes as its central concern, then, the interplay between visuality and embodiment, and seeks papers engaged across a variety of areas extending from critical engagements with representations of sex and/or bodies, through to analyses of the shaping of perception/s as one facet of bodily being-in-the-world. Paper topics might include:

• phenomenology of perception/s, particularly their denaturalisation
• representation, especially of bodies, sex/gender and sexuality
• representations of /as resistance to norms of sex/gender and sexuality
• modes of spectatorship, both normative and non-normative
• the gaze (filmic and medical), the look, the stare
• images of the body and body images
• perceptions of bodies in/of space
• female masculinities, male femininities, butch, femme, trans* and other
• styles/figurations of bodily being
• seeing pathology, and other aspects of the medical gaze
• interventions in normative imaginaries
• panoptics and panopticism
• visual imaginaries
• practices of visuality
• filmic modes of visuality
• televisuality

Abstracts of 300 words should be forwarded to the following address: somatechnicsadmin#gmail.com before the 30th of June 2009. For more information about somatechnics and the Somatechnics Research Centre, please visit www.somatechnics.mq.edu.au.

Source: genus@genus.gu.se