University of Florida 1st Annual Black Cultural Interventions into Gender and Sexuality Studies (Past, Present, and Future) March 23-24, 2007

This conference will allow scholars to have extended conversation about how elements of representation, regulation, consumption, identity, and production of black culture contribute to the broadening of gender and sexuality studies. For this conference, culture means the production of vernacular traditions, oral traditions, political prose, film, art (print, visual, media), dance, performance, and written traditions (such as manuscripts and books), as well as a wide range of sociopolitical ideologies, literary history, and technologies. Key questions that the conference seeks to address: How have black culture and black cultural studies impacted gender and sexuality studies? How does the continued commodification of black culture impact black discourses of gender and sexuality? How do we locate multiple and historical sexual discourses of African diasporic communities? Does African Diasporic culture offer alternatives to Western binaries of gender and sexuality? What role does performativity play in black discourses of gender and sexuality? What do cultural technologies suggest for the future of gender and sexuality in black communities? How do considerations of nationality and geography affect the aforementioned questions? Panel and paper topics can cover a broad range of themes and concerns.

Please submit 250-word proposals (MS word) for papers, workshops, panels, roundtable discussions, and performances to Dr. L.H. Stallings (stalling@english.ufl.edu)by December 15, 2006.