Excess, Desire and Twenty-First Century Women’s Writing
8–10 Feb. 2017. The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia

Far from being in excess, are studies of gender in twenty-first century women’s writing dwindling, no longer “in vogue?” And yet, at the same time, we are told, public conversations about gender and sexuality are “too much,” “over the top,” out of bounds and out of touch. With a desire of adding to or redressing this feminist excess, Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s Liberation, in association with the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association, invites proposals for conference papers dealing with the notions of excess and desire as they are developed in twenty-first century women’s writing.

Jennifer McWeeny reads two female characters in de Beauvoir’s L’Invitée (1943) as “one woman who has multiple, contradictory, excessive selves” (2012). Monique Wittig made a similar claim about the division of the I (j/e) in The Lesbian Body (1973), arguing that “[t]he bar … is a sign of excess. A sign that helps to imagine an excess of ‘I,’ an ‘I’ exalted;” Teresa de Lauretis adds that we might think about excess precisely “as a resistance to identification … [o]r of a dis-identification with femininity” (Lauretis 2007). French feminist theory frequently deals with female “symbolic excess,” disruption and desire (see also Rosemary Hennessy 1993,Mary Russo 1995, Karen Kopelson 2006): bel hooks interprets desire as “yearning” for a better world: post-racism, post-exploitation. We invite abstracts which consider excess and/or desire in these ways, or others, including (but not limited to):

• Female embodiment, both abled and disabled
• Jouissance and enjoyment
• Food, eating, consumption
• Speaking out, current feminist discourses in the public sphere and excess and/or desire as feminist critique
• Excess(es) of trauma and violence
• The grotesque and the carnivalesque
• The excess or uncanniness of literary language
• The excess of theory
• Desire, yearning and capitalism’s negative excess(es)
• Desire and revolution
• The “proper” and the ladylike
• Excess affect
• Comparison with antecedents in the pre-21st Century
• Cross-cultural/transnational excess and/or desire
Confirmed attendees so far include Sneja Gunew, Susan Sheridan, Gina Wisker, Sanjukta Dasgupta, Devaleena Das.

Send abstracts of 250 words (for 20 minute papers) and brief biography to Prof. Carole Ferrier c.ferrier@uq.edu.au and Dr Jessica Gildersleeve jessica.gildersleeve@usq.edu.au by 18 November 2016.