CALL FOR PAPERS: 

PRIVACY (and Secrecy)

  

15^th annual Cultural Studies Conference

at Kansas State University

  

March 9-11, 2006

Kansas State University

Manhattan, Kansas

Conference Description:

               We invite examinations of the wide range of issues, theories, and histories that circulate around privacy as a contested term and cultural idea(l).   The notion of the private self undergirds our understandings of literacy, knowledge, communication, and identity. 

               In the United States, the crisis of privacy currently serves as the nexus for the contentious discourses of “American” and “un-American” values, even as the private domain increasingly comes under legislative control through mechanisms such as the “Marriage Amendments” being ratified in many states. 

               We hope to attract a diverse range of inquiries, methods, textual analyses, and historical perspectives that problematize the cultural terrain of privacy and its emergence as a powerful metanarrative – one championed as a universal, quasi-natural right, and yet one firmly linked to capitalist ideologies of the individual and private property.  Additionally, we encourage proposals that examine the equally powerful histories of illuminating the ‘private’ individual as a subject of the State by surveillance, observation, and other mechanisms of control.

               We especially encourage presentations that interrogate how women and members of other historically marginalized groups have formulated alternative conceptions of privacy or navigated their exclusion from the “rights” of privacy. 

Keynote Speakers: 

• George Chauncey, social and cultural historian; author of Why Marriage?  The History Shaping Today’s Debate over Gay Equality (2004) and Gay New York:  Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (1994).
• Patricia Traxler, poet and novelist; author of three collections of poetry including Forbidden Words (1994), and a novel, Blood (2002).

Send one-page abstracts to:

Michele Janette

Director, Program in Cultural Studies

English Department

Kansas State University

108 E/CS Building

Manhattan, KS  66506-6501.

Email abstracts encouraged:  mjanette@ksu.edu.

 Deadline:  October 24, 2005.

Some previous conferences: Property, Commodity, Culture (1997) | Violence, Incorporated (1998) | Real Culture, Reproduction(s), and Rip-Offs (1999) | Who Counts? (2000) | Family, Kinship & Cultural Studies (2001) | Late Modern Planet (2002) | Brain Power (2003) | Sex and the Body Politic (2004) | Visual Culture: Image Icon Ideology (2005).