5th Global Conference

Monday 3rd November - Wednesday 5th November 2008
Salzburg, Austria

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Venue & Accommodation

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This research conference seeks to explore issues of sex and sexuality within the context of persons and interpersonal relationships and across a range of critical, contextual and cultural perspectives. Seeking to encourage innovative, creative, inter, multi and post disciplinary dialogues, we warmly welcome papers from all disciplines, professions and vocations which struggle to understand what it is to be a sexual person today and what it means for persons to stand in individual, group and social relationships of sex and sexuality, love and intimacy, desire and friendship.

In particular papers, workshops and presentations are invited on any of the following themes:

1. Political Geographies of Identity

• The public and private interlacing of sexuality; accounting for the link between identity and sexuality
• Should we re-think the idea of sexuality as a defining parameter of our selves?
• Pre-modern, modern and postmodern sexualities
• Sexuality and belonging; the local, social, national and international
• Structures, institutions and systems; economics and sexual identity; work and sexuality
• Acts and interactions; representations and symbols; space and time

2. Bodies and Desire, Lust and Sex

• Bonds of lust and desire; unleashing and containing; unlocking and repressing
• Body rituals and the exchange of fluids: aesthetics, explorations, games, representations
• Fucking, sucking, penetrating, engulfing, petting, biting, rubbing, licking, touching, kissing
• The secular and the religious; the heretical and the sacred
• Norms that rule our sexual lives; the death or killing of desire and lust
• Persons re-inventing their bodies, desires and lust; re-invention of sex and sexual beings?

3. Love, Sex, Friendship and Bonds of Care

• Commitment and obligation; choice and respect; loyalty and trust
• Sex and friendship; how to be a sexual friend? how to build enduring sexual friendships?
• Love and the romantic bond; caring and sex; is love a problem for sex and friendship?
• Social, normative and symbolic shifting grounds: free and caring sexual beings?
• Meaning, commitment, respect and sexual freedom
• Post sexual revolution contexts: utopian landscapes of sexual bonds of caring?

4. Detachment and Sex

• Hooking-up, casual sex, one-night stands; sex with strangers, what was your name again?
• Cyber-sex, phone-sex; virtual sex and sexuality
• Isolation, loneliness, estrangement and sexual deprivation
• Pleasures of the self; masturbation as detached sex?
• Detachment and the destruction of trust; betrayal, cheating and infidelity
• Separation, mourning and bereavement; unlinking, unloving and unsexing

5. Uncomfortable Territories

• Violence and sex; sexual abuse; abjection and sexuality; subjection and the sexual self
• Sex and animals, sex and pets; sex, desire and love across species boundaries
• Family, blood bonds and sex within boundaries of kinship; desire, sex and incest
• Sex games and sexual play that make people uncomfortable
• Scatological desire and sex; death, lust and sex
• Dislocated, homeless, disassociated, uprooted sex, desire and lust

6. Narrative, Aesthetic and Creative Representations

• The theatre of sex and sexual beings; sex on stage and on the stage of life
• Dreams, fantasies and desire; symbols, meaning and the unconscious
• Unfixing sexual categories of the self through art and artistic creation and narratives
• The grammar of lust and desire in artistic creation and representation
• Pornography and the erotic: artistic representation, aesthetic and creative virtue, narrative displacement?
• Is there a creation of new sexual territories by way of art and the aesthetic realm?

7. Reproduction and New Kinship

• New reproductive technologies; fertility/infertility/hyper-fertility; artificial insemination, sperm and egg donation
• Birth control, abortion and sterilisation; family planning (historical and contemporary) and eugenics
• Sex selection, adoption and surrogacy; medical technologies, reproduction and ethics
• Reproductive rights, nation-states and social inequalities (race/ethnicity, gender/sex, class, nationality)
• Migration and trans-national families; international adoption networks
• New family formations and new kinship ties; families by choice and the redefinition of 'blood ties'

8. Identity Politics: Recognition, Citizenship and Rights

• Inequality, power relations, domination and sexuality
• Normalisation and the good sexual citizen; dissidence and the refusal to comply
• Homogeneity and heterogeneity, sameness and diversity, identity and fluid sexualities
• The other from within; unfixed sexualities, fluid identities; a sexual ethics for our times
• Social movements and their impact on rights and institutional change
• Sexual freedom, personhood, resistance and rebellion

Papers will be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 13th June 2008. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be developed and submitted by Friday 10th October 2008. The draft paper should be of no more than 8 or 9 pages long and ready for a 20 minute (maximum) presentation during the conference.

If interested in participating, 300 word abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order: author(s), affiliation, email address, title of abstract, body of abstract.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper or panel proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

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