“Performing (In)Visibility” calls upon scholars to interrogate performance’s reliance on the visual and/or visible. Though performance is often imagined as some public spectacle, emphasizing its visibility may also call forth invisible or non-visible functions of discursive performatives. Thus, proposals might consider how one visibly performs, what it means to perform something already apparent, what goes unrecognized or gets left out of performances, and how we might understand absence as an alternative performance. We are interested in how tensions between visibility and invisibility, public and private, presence and absence, and excess and restraint inform the ways we think about performance/performativity as interdisciplinary theoretical constructs.

The conference seeks to engage such topics as:
* Performance and the public/private sphere
* Identity and its markers (race, class, gender, sexuality, etc) in/as performance
* Conceptual, performance and body art
* Patriotism and/or performing nationalism, nationhood, or citizenship
* Performance and New Media
* Performance and history, authenticity, truth and/or fiction
* Slam and other poetry performances
* Performing war, globalism, violence, or terrorism
* Excessive performances: spectacle, pageantry, carnival
* Performance in sports/business environments: enhancement, anxiety, norms, testing
* The performance(s) of academia: discursive and pedagogical performances
* Star personas, the media, and performance and/or notably unpopular performances
* Performing illness and healing
* Capitalism/Materialism/Liberalism/Neoconservativism as performances
* Archives and performance

Because performance and/or performativity are terms relevant to contemporary critical inquiry across disciplines, we look forward to submissions from such diverse fields as: Anthropology, Architecture, Art, Communications, Comparative Literature, Critical Race Studies, Cultural Studies, Dance, Education, English, Film, Gender Studies, Geography, History, Journalism, Law, Linguistics, Medicine, Musicology, Performance Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology, Theater, Urban Studies, as well as other relevant fields of study.

This year’s keynote will be a performance of Michelle Matlock’s The Mammy Project. This work explores relationships between performance and identity as Matlock “traces the life and times of Nancy Green, the first woman hired to play the part of Aunt Jemima,” following the American Mammy icon through history and popular culture.

Please submit a 250-word abstract, with title, for a 15-20 minute presentation as an MS Word file attachment to:
grad-conference@uwm.edu

Deadline for Submissions: October 1, 2006

For more information, visit the conference website at:
grad-conference.blogspot.com
For more information on The Mammy Project, visit the website at:
www.themammyproject.com