EMBODIED AUTHORSHIPS
INTERMEDIA AND GENDERED REPRESENTATIONS OF CULTURAL CREATION

How can one be seen as an author? What values, attributes, and features must creators represent to be recognized as such? What uses and interpretations do their authorial figures generate? How do they become materialised in the body of their work? In what ways are these authorial figures shaped by the gender or ethnicity of the subjects that embody them? These are some of the questions that we propose to address, in line with contemporary Author Studies: those critical approaches that –from Literary Sociology, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Philosophy, Film Studies, History of Literature, Art and Ideas, etc.– have turned the authorial figure into one of the most important protagonists of Cultural and Literary Theory in recent decades. In dialogue with these perspectives, we consider the author beyond his/her factual reality –that is, as a real individual– and we propose to analyze him/her as a cultural “artefact”. This is to say, on the one hand, as the product of processes of recognition, authorization, and cultural construction that are inseparable from the incorporation and staging of historically determined attributes that define what an author or an artist is; on the other hand, as an imaginary figure that emerges from the various representations in which it is staged and depicted.

Starting from these premises, we intend to discuss the functions and the characteristics that are granted to the figure of the creator in Western culture and in today’s globalized and mediated society. Without neglecting the reflections on the concept of author and its deconstruction in contemporary philosophy, we invite inquiries into the different imaginaries associated with creativity and cultural production; their connection with the (de)legitimization of literary and artistic genres and the artification of cultural products; or the mechanisms of exclusion and marginalization of subjects (“marked” by their gender or their ethnicity, for example), artistic practices or “non-hegemonic” cultural traditions.

In parallel, we aim to analyze how these functions and attributes are staged and performed in the self-representation and/or hetero-representation of specific authorial figures, either linked to “real” subjects or to fictional characters. In what ways are authorial images constructed in literary, artistic, or filmic works, or in media spaces? To what extent might the means of dissemination determine the authorial modes of enunciation, their reception and evaluation? How are those figures shaped by biographical, documentary, or museological narratives? How are authorial postures embodied in iconographic representations? And how do these embodied representations validate, subvert or negotiate with gender, race, and class stereotypes?

Among the topics submissions might address are:

Paradigms of authorship in arts and culture. Convergences, divergences, and ruptures.
A. Values and counter-values of artistic and cultural authorship (autonomy, authenticity, originality, singularity, inwardness vs. community, corporeality, repetition, reproduction, copy, etc.).
B. Authorization and artification modalities in Philosophy, Literature, Visual Arts, Film and Cinematography, Performing Arts, Music, Digital Media, Journalism, Translation, Design, Cooking, etc.
C. Authorship and literary and artistic genres. Textual / authorial hierarchies.
D. Authorships in transit: postural transferences between temporal, linguistic, geographic, or cultural borders.

The author as a cultural object. Intermedial staging of literary and artistic authorship.
A. The artistic work as an authorial arena. Authorial figurations in literary, philosophical, journalistic or biographic texts and paratexts.
B. Iconographies and embodied appearances of the authorial figure. Visual representations (painting, sculpture, photography, etc.), audiovisual productions (television, film, documentary, etc.), digital media (social networks, blogs, institutional webs, etc.), and museological representations, between others.
C. The cultural creator as literary, theatrical, or film character.

Authorship, body, gender, and ethnicity.
A. The body as corpus, the corpus as body: mechanisms of (dis)embodiment of the author and the literary and artistic works.
B. Gendered and racialized authorial performances: stereotypes, differences, and subversions.
C. The conditions of the author function. Restrictions, interpretations, and uses of the cultural products “marked” by gender or ethnicity. Genders and genres. Gender, consumption and popular culture.