A conference with international keynote speakers, including Yasmina Benguigui, Shaheen Monshipoor, Anouar Majid and Slavoj Zizek.

Call for Papers: Scholars/ Researchers/ Professors/ Graduate Students should send a one-page abstract and/or panel discussion topics.

Description:¡§Gauming, gauging, gaping, gawking, and gazing at the gauze¡¨„³ Meanings & Signifiying Practices and Problematics of the Muslim veil.
The conference focuses on

1. the socio-political, historical, analytical, psychoanalytical and/or feminist interpretations (impact, reasons, meaning, discourses, practices, liberation/assimilation / identificatory practice/oppression¡K) of the phenomenon of the Muslim veil (burka, tchador, scarf¡K) in society, literature, history¡K, as well as,
2. the deconstruction of the veil¡¦s Western discourse (aka the recent ¡§French law¡¨), as univocal, rationalist expression of superiority (the ¡§evil veil¡¨,) ignoring its own complicity in the matters of the veil, and, also,
3. the semiotic complexity of the ¡§veil¡¨ (hymen, screen, libidinal tissue/surface/ wrappings(¡K), as cultural, psychological, religious phenomena.
   We need a semiosis of the veil, a deconstructive morphology of the veil cutting around disciplines, and not a First World repressive discourse about the ¡§medievalism of Islamic practices.¡¨
   The point is to undermine the Western Master Discourse through the Native Informant (Gayatri Spivak¡¦s expression), and the Patriarchal, Native, Master Discourse through what used to be First World Theory and has now mutated into postmodern, multicultural theories, by-passing the international division of labor.
   The conference addresses the problematics of the veil from a variety of positions and cultural politics, combining a systematic approach with an asystematic one, for as Schlegel wrote, ¡§It is just as deadly for the mind to have a system as to have none. It will thus be necessary to decide to combine both.¡¨ Is the veil an ¡§Oriental,¡¨ or an Orientalist problem/phenomenon¡X-like pyramidology (cf. Hegel)?
   This conference especially welcomes the diachronic and synchronic approaches analyzing the positioning of the veil which functions as an aporia or a logical asymmetry in the Western discourse and as a visual and epistemic testimony to the problem of otherness. Lacanian, Feminist, Foucauldian, Multiculturalist, Deleuzian¡K, approaches especially welcome.
   >>>> A selection of the Veil Conference papers will be published.