Symposium on Gender and Aesthetics: Art, Film, and Literature

The Gender and Women's Studies Forum at Sabanci University invites proposals for the symposium, “Gender and Aesthetics: Art, Film, and Literature”, which will take place on November 6-7-8, 2015 in Istanbul. 

The symposium aims to explore how gender informs the theory, history, creation, and reception of art and literature and how art and literature influence and challenge definitions and experiences of gender and sexuality. Materials for the presentations may be drawn from literature, art, film, popular culture, theatre, dance, and related fields. Theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches focusing on specific texts, themes or formal issues are welcome. 

Some topics that may be addressed in this context are: 

• Gender, sexuality, and self as artistic and cultural constructs

• Gendered and queer representations and reconfigurations of the body, space, temporality 

• Gendered and queer representations and reconfigurations of desire and transgression

• Literary and artistic explorations of the relations, tensions, intersections between class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality

• Literary and artistic expressions of crises in gender and sexual roles and identities

• Gendered definitions and practices of authorship, creativity, influence, and artistic authority

• The role gender norms and constructs play in establishing, reproducing, or contesting aesthetic values, traditions, and hierarchies 

• Literary and artistic experimentation as a strategy for re-conceiving gender and sexuality

• Feminist and queer perspectives on subjects such as language, the gaze, the self-portrait, autobiography 

• The relationship between gender and conceptions of beauty, taste, and the body

The symposium will be in English and Turkish. Proposals for 20 minute presentations should be about 300 words and sent to genderforum@sabanciuniv.edu by May 1, 2015.