CfP: Monique Wittig: Twenty Years Later (Event, 03/2023 in Berkeley, 06/2023 in Geneve); by: 30.09.2022

Ty Blakeney, William M. Burton, Ilana Eloit, Carolina Topini, and Agnès Vannouvong (Web)

Time: 17.-18.03.2023
Venue: University of California, Berkeley

Time: 19.-21.06.2023
Venue: Université de Genève

In 2023, we will mark the 20th anniversary of the passing of the lesbian activist, writer and philosopher Monique Wittig (1935-2003), as well as the 50th anniversary of the publication of her Corps lesbien, with a two-part international conference. Hosted by the Department of French at the Univ. of California – Berkeley and the Institut des Études Genre at the Univ. de Genève, this conference seeks to encourage new directions in scholarship on Wittig and to stimulate transatlantic and international exchange about her. The organizers are guided in this by the spirit of Wittig’s own life, split between Europe and North America, and the bilingual corpus she left with us.
The reception of Wittig’s work has been divided both temporally and linguistically. A first period, from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, saw her influence spread throughout Europe and North America. She initially made her name as a novelist identified with the Nouveau Roman, then as an activist and theorist within the women’s liberation movement. These indissociable literary and political projects led her work to become one of the foundational building-blocks of postmodern feminism and queer theory in the US. There followed a relative decline in scholarly attention paid to her ideas. But in the past decade, a reinvigorated enthusiasm for Wittig on both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere has emerged, opening a second moment of reception.
One goal of this conference is to connect these two periods, to historicise the waxing and waning of interest in Wittig’s work. Another is to assess the stakes of contemporary reception of that work both within and outwith academia. In the context of revitalised feminist and lesbian activism, this task is all the more compelling. Read more … (PDF)

Source: Female-l