Regulating Intimacy Graduate Symposium
Indiana University, Bloomington
October 17-19, 2014
http://regulatingintimacy.wordpress.com/
Paper submission deadline: April 30, 2014
Symposium registration deadline: July 31, 2014
Intimate relationships exist in many forms but register most often in the popular imagination as sexual. Regulatory systems like marriage, criminal law, social norms, and sex education privilege sexual intimacy and promote monogamous, (hetero)sexual, familial relationships over all others. Regulating Intimacy seeks to bring together graduate students, professionals, and the scholarly community from a wide variety of (inter)disciplines, including women’s and gender studies, law, education, and public health and biology, to discuss the institutional forces– legislation, policy, religion, and scientific authority– and the gendered, raced, classed, and (dis)abled sociocultural norms that define and regulate human relationships.
The theme of the 2014 inaugural Regulating Intimacy symposium is “Beyond Sex” to directly address the causes and consequences of a traditional understanding of intimacy. We strive to shift academic conversations beyond sex toward considerations of alternate intimacies and destabilize hierarchies that privilege erotic and romantic closeness over platonic relationships and deem particular configurations improper, insignificant, or unnatural. Who can be intimate with whom or what? Where is intimacy established– in the bedroom, classroom, or public spaces, in the body, the mind, or the ether? How do alternative definitions of intimacy challenge or develop our understandings of human interaction, social scripts, and power and privilege?
Regulating Intimacy has identified several topics for critical inquiry and engagement. Submissions may include, but are not limited to, the following:
Barriers to legal and/or social recognition of non-sexual relationships
Alternative kinship formations and friendship
Human and non-human intimacies, unconventional connections, the forbidden and taboo
Caregiving and healing
Labor, the workplace, and colleague relationships
Queer kinships and asexuality
Loneliness, isolation, and social stigma
No-child movements, reproductive technology, and celibacy
The form for individual and panel applications is attached. Please submit applications by April 30, 2014.
