Stonewall at 50 and Beyond: Interrogating the Legacy and Memory of the 1969 Riots

University of Paris-Est Créteil / IMAGER (EA 3958)

Paris-Dauphine University (Paris-Sciences-et-Lettres) / IRISSO (UMR 7170-1427)

June 3^rd–5^th, 2019

Deadline for paper submissions: December 1^st, 2018.

Call for papers:

The original announcement of the conference was followed by well-founded criticism regarding the organizing committee’s and scientific committee’s lack of inclusiveness. The composition of these two committees was consequently modified. The call for papers below was revised by the new organizing committee. The composition of the scientific committee and bibliographical indications are available on the conference website https://stonewallat50.sciencesconf.org/.

The Stonewall riots are fraught with a conflictual memory. A standard narrative might read as follows: In the night of June 27, 1969, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village bar on Christopher Street in New York, refuse to endure yet another occurrence of the police harassment they routinely faced. For five days and nights, the neighborhood was the scene of a confrontation between rioters and the police. In the following weeks and months, this upsurge reinforced emerging liberation movements that coalesced into a diverse political force. The events were celebrated the following year and have since generally been presented as “the birth of the gay liberation movement” that is commemorated in today’s yearly LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) pride marches.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall, this conference aims to shed critical light on this major event and its possible effects on the development of LGBTQ mobilizations around the world. It seeks to investigate the processes of memorialization, as well as the political legacy and the cultural and activist representations of Stonewall.

The various ways in which the history of the event has been written reveal lasting tensions within LGBTQ movements. While among the rioters were lesbians, sex workers, drag queens, transgender and gender non-conforming people and people of color, such as Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, post-Stonewall movements have produced narratives that invisibilize these protagonists and their multiple sexual, gender, and racial identities. In what ways have these tensions been exacerbated or reshuffled by the memorial conflicts that Stonewall crystallizes?

Paradoxically, while Stonewall was an act of disobedience and insubordination to state power, it has been reclaimed as the starting point of an assimilationist politics of respectability by the more mainstream LGBTQ organizations in the United States. And LGBTQ pride marches have gradually turned into entertaining parades or commodified festivals. How, concretely, has the understanding of riots driven by the rejection of policing and social control gradually shifted toward a narrative in support of homonormativity, state security, and neoliberalism? How does this shift affect working-class LGBTQ people and LGBTQ people of color? Through what processes has this history been re-appropriated in official discourses sanctioning more or less subtle forms of racism, sexism, and homonationalism? Correlatively, what enduring role do commercial venues (bars, clubs, etc.) play in the construction and politicization of sexual and gender minority identities and communities?

Stonewall is indeed also mythic because its fame has exceeded US national borders. The conference aims to look beyond this particular case in order to address the reception and influence of Stonewall in other national contexts, and the circulation, translation, importation, reappropriations, and sometimes rejection of LGBTQ communitarian practices and cultural models that originate in the United States. How has the memory of the riots crossed borders? Does Stonewall’s notoriety “colonize” the memory of movements born outside the United States? Does it invisibilize or even destabilize different forms of identification and resistance? How does the Stonewall myth participate in the globalization of sexual and gender identities?

We invite submissions from scholars in all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, as well as activists and movement collectives. Submissions based on empirical data (archives, interviews, ethnographies, cultural productions in literature, cinema, TV series, comics, songs, etc.) and with a comparative or intersectional approach will be especially welcome.

Submissions may reflect one or several of the following sets of issues:

• Narrating Stonewall: the diverse and conflicted memories and histories of Stonewall;
• From riots to respectability: investigating assimilation and normalization strategies in the “LGBTQ movement”;
• Beyond Christopher Street: transnational and transhistorical perspectives on queer liberation;
• Circulating sexual identities and struggles in an imbalanced world: homonationalism, transnational solidarity, and the homogenization of identities and modes of resistance;
• “Out of the bars and into the streets”? Political uses of commercial venues;
• Resisting police harassment before and after Stonewall: facing state control.

When and how to submit:

Paper submissions in French or English (c. 500 words) with an explicit presentation of the methodology and data, and a brief biographical note (5 lines) should be uploaded by December 1st, 2018, at: https://stonewallat50.sciencesconf.org.

Selected speakers will be notified by January 15th, 2019.

Organization:

The conference will take place at the universities of Paris-Est Créteil and Paris-Dauphine, France, on June 3rd–5th, 2019.

Organizing committee: Catherine Achin (Paris-Dauphine), Emmanuel Beaubatie (IRIS-EHESS, INED), Hugo Bouvard (Paris-Dauphine), Guillaume Marche (Paris-Est Créteil), Lucie Prauthois (Paris-Dauphine), Antoine Servel (Paris-Est Créteil), Damien Trawale (URMIS).

Contact and information: stonewallat50@gmail.com.

REPRESENTATION IN THE TIME OF THE POSTHUMAN: TRANSHUMAN ENHANCEMENT IN 21ST CENTURY STORYTELLING

16th International Conference on Contemporary Narratives in English

http://typh.unizar.es/conference

University of Zaragoza, Spain

May 29-31, 2019

The drive towards personal progress may be considered intrinsic to the human species. Whether intellectual, emotional, spiritual or bodily, perfection –or, less ambitiously, improvement– has always been pursued by different means like education, cultural development, meditation, or physical exercise, to name a few. What seems to have changed in recent decades is the tools available in the race for individual enhancement, given the rapidly evolving fields of science and technology as applied to human desires to enlarge one’s memory and intelligence, lengthen one’s life span, or create genetically stronger and healthier children.

This interest in human progress is key to understand Transhumanism, a cultural and philosophical movement that sees in reason, science and technology the means to overcome human limitations in both our bodies and minds (Bostrom, More, Pearce, Kurzweil). Genetically modified and technologically enhanced humans are transhumans in constant development towards the posthuman, a condition which would radically exceed the capacities of present humans and would entail extreme physiological, genetic and neurological change.

This inherently optimistic movement contrasts with Critical Posthumanism (Badmington, Braidotti, Graham, Hayles, Wolfe, Haraway, Herbrechter), which also sees the human as non-fixed and mutable but which questions anthropocentrism, human exceptionalism and the centrality of the subject in the Anthropocene. They see transhumanism as an intensification of the Enlightenment concept of “Man” as the measure of all things.

The aim of this conference is to explore both how fiction in the Anglo-American sphere has addressed the question of what it means to be human and also how the literary field itself has changed in the time of the 4th industrial revolution (Floridi, Schwab), in which digital information and communication technologies have become essential and in which the analog gives way to the digital.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

     –      Representations of human enhancement and transhumanist beliefs in fiction

• Representations of enhanced human beings, cyborgs and digital posthumans
• Ideological positions and exploration of the contradictions of the posthuman in fiction
• Identities in (re)construction: gender, race, sexuality o Global markets and environmental damage
• New aesthetic and narratological approaches
• Speculative fiction and other genres dealing with the posthuman
• Topics of interest: utopian and dystopian approaches, ethical concerns and challenges –

     –     Changes in the literary field and consequences of the posthuman

•  From the analog into the digital o Enhancement as seen in multimedia and transmedia storytelling
• Post-literature, trans-literature, enhanced literature
• E-literature or digital-born literature
• Changes in the traditional roles of the writer, the reader or the text itself
• New sensory engagements

Plenary Speakers:

Stefan Herbrechter, writer, academic, translator and researcher on Cultural Theory and Critical Posthumanism at Coventry University (UK) and a Privatdozent at Heidelberg University (Germany).

Alexandra K. Glavanakova, Associate Professor in American Literature and Culture at St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia (Bulgaria). Sherryl Vint, Professor of Science Fiction Media Studies at the University of California, Riverside (USA).

The conference is organised by the members of the research project “Trauma, Culture and Posthumanity: The Definition of Being in Contemporary North-American Fiction,” which is part of the research group “Contemporary Narrative in English” at the Department of English and American Studies of the University of Zaragoza, Spain.

Paper proposals should be 300 words maximum, including a title. Please submit proposals, along with a brief CV and email address to the conference organisers Sonia Baelo-Allué and Mónica Calvo-Pascual at posthumanconference2019@gmail.com

Deadline for submissions: January 7th, 2019.

Surveilling America on Screen: Discourses on the Nostalgic Lens

Call for Papers

Building on the work of our previous three collections, this call for papers seeks to investigate
the role of nostalgia on screen from within the context of contemporary American culture and
politics.

In the current global era, media technologies present and represent the climactic catastrophes,
social and cultural happenings, policies and politics of the US, consciously or subconsciously
buttressing notions of what and how the US is seen. From the vantage point of Europe, the US
appears a homogenous monolith. In the glare of worldwide information, the dominant global
discourse of the US remains one of ‘exceptionalism’- a self-indulgent espousal of the freedom of
its citizens above all else, a view which overlooks the social crises and moral affray inherent in
the soul of the nation. Our previous collection Surveillance, Race, Culture (2018) attempted to
interrogate some of the notions of the US in light of the lived realities of its citizens, in
particular, the troubled concept of race.

Looking carefully toward, or ‘surveilling’ the US, American Studies, as a field of enquiry, has long
been informed by an ‘Old World’ view of the US. The US has been inseparable from its
beginnings and continues to be assessed in terms of its lofty constitutional goals. But closer
examination yields some delicate and disparate threads of reality. Many of the ideas of what it
means to be American are entwined with old and defunct notions of what the average American
life is like. Many of the ideals of American life, though celebrated and venerated by current
political leaders, are unrealistic or impossible for the vast majority. Yet national discourse seems
incapable of abandoning such goals, caught in what Frederic Jameson termed the “irrepressible
historical impulse”.

As our previous collection has evidenced, the dichotomy of ‘them’ and ‘us’ is at once inherent
and elusive in contemporary culture and society. Such fears of change and of outsiders can be
seen or felt, either overtly or subliminally in popular screen culture, from Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (1956) and It Came from Outer Space (1953) to Get Out (2017) and A Quiet Place (2018). In
television, shows such as Stranger Things, Dark and The OA remind us of the persistent nature,
not only of postwar rhetoric, but also of the contemporary interest in nostalgia evidence in visual
American culture.

Stemming from the Cold War, notions of American nostalgia (often envisioned via white picket
fences and familial togetherness) have continued to shape core values related to power and
order, and at present, are frequently shored up in contemporary visual culture. Like US history
itself, the constant reconstruction and reference to origins, frontiers and ‘greatness’ appear both
harnessed and critiqued from within contemporary film and television narratives under the guise
of the nostalgic lens.

This collection seeks to excavate multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary iterations of nostalgia
which are either explicit or implicit within contemporary visual culture. By examining the hyperpresence
of nostalgia alongside the ideation of US value systems, practices and policies, this
collection aims to explore and interrogate contemporary American ideology as it is created and
sustained by the lens and screen. This collection aims, via the nostalgic lens to critique past,
current and contemporary American culture and politics, and the im/possibility of making
“America great again”.

Topics might include, but are not restricted to, the following:
• How does nostalgia inform global readings of the US?
• In what ways does the contemporary screen iterations of nostalgia ally with
contemporary political phenomena?
• Representations of American political influence on screen culture
• US screen fictions and the postmodern
• The implications of portraying the (idyllic) past onscreen today
• The role of the community through the lens (and the inherent complications of such
viewing and screening)
• The portrayal of the nostalgic family as ‘American’ via visual culture and its relationship
to contemporary American culture
• Narratives of displacement and marginality from within nostalgia inflected visual culture
• Gendered nostalgia and its complication from within a contemporary setting (with
reference to current gendered movements such as #MeToo)
• Queered nostalgia and the rewriting of sexuality on screen from within a nostalgic lens
• The broader use of the ‘lens’ by which to view historical and current US politics policy

Abstracts of 300-500 words, along with a brief bio of no more than 150 words should be sent to
Dr Susan Flynn, University of the Arts London, s.flynn@lcc.arts.ac.uk and Dr Antonia Mackay
Oxford Brookes University, antoniamackay@brookes.ac.uk by 31st January 2019.