The Department of Languages, Linguistics and Comparative Literature at Florida Atlantic University-Boca Raton is hosting a symposium on Discourses of Peripheral Sexualities in Hispanic Studies. The symposium will take place on April 18-19, 2014, at FAU in Boca Raton, Florida.

Description: This symposium proposes to examine discourses that produce, express, and represent various peripheral sexualities in Hispanic cultures. We understand peripheral sexualities as any non-normative erotic or sexual manifestation, including licit sexualities (those carried out with the other’s consent) and illicit sexualities (nonconsensual, resulting in physical or psychic damage, etc.). The fluid historicity of peripheral sexualities, driven by their dynamic transformations, displacements, and reformulations throughout history, suggests that they resist the limiting definitions imposed by psychiatry’s nosological classifications. Indeed, many peripheral sexualities appear in the Latin American and Spanish traditions long before science began to systematically categorize the practices, having been produced, interrogated by, and represented through discourses of colonialism, slavery, imperialism, and more recently are shaped by the forces of globalization, migration, and post humanism, among other influences. We invite scholars to contribute papers that foster new critical dialogues on the artistic, literary, and linguistic forms through which these sexualities have been articulated and on the new centers that peripheral sexualities often establish in the evolution of human sexuality, societal norms, and creative uses of language.

Please submit via email: a 300-word abstract in English or Spanish & a contact information page (name, institution, email, phone number, paper title) to conference organizers: Nuria Godón (ngodon@fau.edu) and Michael Horswell (horswell@fau.edu) by November 25th 2013

Selected papers will be considered for possible journal publication.

[Many thanks to Mary Ann Gosser Esquilín for bringing this item to our attention. Painting above: “Currents” by Marimater O’Neill.]