Tübingen: Call for papers

      by Prof. Dr. Ingrid Hotz-Davies

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Call for Papers Gender Forum: Off Centre: Eccentricity and Gender Guest editors Prof. Dr. Ingrid Hotz-Davies (English Department) Prof. Dr. Stefanie Gropper (Department for Scandinavian Studies) University of Tübingen For a special issue of gender forum, submissions addressing questions of gender and eccentricity are invited.  The marginal, the liminal, the subordinate, the peripheral, the fringe: contemporary theories and practices of literary and cultural studies know many terms by which areas which appear outside a given or assumed centre – of social or political power, of normativity, of definition – may be named, discussed, given a voice. But these terms tend to be curiously static, describing fixed positions which appear, despite the turbulent and conflicted nature of these allocations, pre-given sites rather than options of choice, spaces for experimentation or techniques of interrogation.  The editors of the proposed special issue of Gender Forum believe that one possible and as yet untested way of thinking about those not in the centre without allocating them a fixed location on the margin, a given identity, a clear location in a gird of social and cultural interactions would be an approach which focuses on the eccentric and its cognates, the singular, the odd, the “off”. We see eccentricity as a textual technique in the realm of literature and as a specific form of performativity in the field of human behaviours: a technique which is geared towards the establishment of positions outside a centre – a centre identified by the technique or performance itself. Its aims may be manifold: the revalidation of a marginal location as an individual choice, the interrogation of the centre from a position that is neither located elsewhere nor anticipated by the choices offered in a centre-periphery binarity, a questioning of the very dynamic of the centre and its outside. In every case, it will be a technique of self-positioning which seeks out, strains towards an option beyond the mutually constitutive locations of centre and periphery, centre and margin, power and subordination.  As yet, the phenomena of the eccentric have been hardly investigated or researched and are only very sketchily theorized. Off Centre: Eccentricity and Gender seeks to remedy this by assembling a varied and multifaceted collection of contributions focusing on any area of literary and cultural production and / or contributing towards the development of theoretical tools for thinking the eccentric. Gender as one of the dominant techniques for the establishment, enforcing and policing of any set of ‘centric’ systems of value and signification is here a particularly suitable field of investigation as we seek to know if the interactions of the centre and its discontents may be thought as a field of eccentric techniques and performances.  Possible areas of investigation:  Theories of eccentricity Gender performativity and eccentricity The dynamics of the eccentric and its normalization The commodification or containment of eccentricity The odd, the singular, the specific as tools of theory and literary practice Eccentricity and resistance

Submission of 1 to 2-page proposals: 1 February 2009 Submission of finished papers: 1 July 2009  Direct submissions to: ingrid.hotz-davies@uni-tuebingen.de and stefanie.gropper@uni-tuebingen.de

gender forum  Prof. Dr. Beate Neumeier (Editor)  Universität zu Köln  Englisches Seminar  Albertus-Magnus-Platz  D-50923 Köln  Tel. ++49-(0)221-470-3030  Fax ++49-(0)221-470-6931  Email: ingrid.hotz-davies@uni-tuebingen.de Visit the website at http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/