[NIS_GS:] CFP: Narrating Gender: Representation and Identity Formation in Contemporary Autobiography (grad) (1/5/06; McGill, 3/11/06-3/12/06)

12th Annual Graduate Conference on Language and Literature McGill University, Montreal
Theme: Permeability and Selfhood
March 11-12, 2006

This call for papers is for a panel to be held at Permeability and Selfhood, the McGill Graduate Conference on Language and Literature, which will take place March 11-12 at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Please email paper abstracts of approximately 300 words.
You can direct submissions to melissa.fink@mail.mcgill.ca by January 5, 2006.

Thanks for your interest, please let me know if you have any questions.
Melissa Fink
(Panel Chair)

Narrating Gender: Representation and Identity Formation in Contemporary Autobiography

This panel will explore textual expressions of gender in autobiographical representations of identity and self. Writers including Audre Lorde and Leslie Feinberg adopt autobiographical narrative as an outlet through which to validate deviant gender identities. These texts provide a forum for self-affirmation, as
well as a means to social recognition and increased understanding.
This panel is explicitly interested in bodies that resist normative expressions of gender, including but certainly not limited to: working-class bodies, differently-abled bodies, queer bodies, and bodies of colour. The panel seeks to understand how deviant bodies are textually represented, as well as how
autobiographical narrative rewrites and reclaims stigmatized gender identities.

Some questions this panel could address are:
How are autobiographical narratives explicitly gendered—or, how does gender determine the narration of self?
What is the role of the reader in problematizing, challenging or validating a textual identity?
How is systematic oppression or violence represented within identity narratives?
How might race, class, sexuality, ability, or other components of identity intersect with gender in autobiographical narratives?
How do autobiographical texts promote or sustain traditionally-invisiblized portraits of self?
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