This CFP enlists papers that engage with, question and interrogate the full range of definitions and cultural/social manifestations of the symptom (and its subject), and also those that identify or posit new ones, from historicist and psychoanalytic perspectives. For both psychoanalysts and historicists, the symptom demands interpretation, which entails an interrogation of the disparity between a symptom's manifest (visible) content and its latent (invisible) content. How does the symptom speak and what does it want to communicate? What motivates its production, and what is its function? How does the symptom articulate the impasse – or the difficulties – that inhere in binary relationships? Given that a symptom cannot be erased, but only replaced by another symptom, can we speak of bad or negative symptoms, and good or positive symptoms, or posit that some symptoms are more ethical and life-enhancing than others? Indeed, is it possible to choose our own symptoms?

We welcome papers that address via theoretical elaboration or case study (cultural or visual analysis), the manifestation of the symptom in terms of its formation, repetition, interpretation, elaboration, wish-fulfillment, compromise or transformation. Possible avenues for the exploration of the symptom include, but are not limited to: gender, racial, ethnic and sexual difference; bodily, linguistic, psychical, literary symptoms; symptom and experience; Sinthome and Lacan; symptom and identity; intersubjectivity and the symptom; medical discourse and the symptom; symptom and the economy of recognition; symptom and performance.

The deadline for receipt of submissions of 2,500 to 6,000 words in length is February 1, 2006.