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CfP: CAA 102nd Annual Conference (Chicago, IL / Feb 12-15, 2014 / submission deadline: May 6, 2013)

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CAA 102nd Annual Conference
Chicago, United States, February 12 - 15, 2014
Submission Deadline: May 6, 2013

Riots, No Diets: Construction of Oppositional Identity in Feminist Activist Art
Olga Kopenkina, New York University; and Corina L. Apostol, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Email: ok12atnyu [dot] edu and corina [dot] lucia [dot] apostolatgmail [dot] com
“Riots, No Diets” refers to the 1990s popular feminist slogan that was associated with Riot Grrrl, a movement that emerged inside the US underground music and art scene. The 2012 trial of the Russian group Pussy Riot in Moscow signaled the existence of feminist art activism that originates from the global protest against capital and the state. This activism inherits the philosophy and tactics of early feminist action groups such as Riot Grrrl and The Women’s Action Coalition (or WAC). However, unlike the early feminist punk groups who were dissatisfied with the leftist politics of previous decades, contemporary feminist activists share the ideology of the New Left. Their aim is to create a global network that could become an efficient tool in the struggle against the dominant power structures and the capitalist status quo. Papers should address contemporary feminist activist artistic practices and their contribution to the construction of oppositional identities in the age of global protests, social networking, and self-organization.

Committee on Women in the Arts: Toward Transnational Feminisms in the Arts
Temma Balducci, Arkansas State University, tbalducciatastate [dot] edu
Recent interest in transnationalism reveals the pressing need to overcome the monocultural underpinnings of Anglo-American feminist scholarship. Several exhibitions and publications have
acknowledged “common differences” among women’s lives and art worldwide as well as the particularities of art feminisms within and beyond Western culture. There remains, however, space to question both how we re/define feminisms beyond Western cultural borders and how transnationalism affects the critical perspective of women in the arts. Papers are encouraged from scholars, critics, curators, and artists that advance transnational perspectives on past and present feminisms in
the arts, interrogate articulations and absences in transnational feminist art, or critically address the transnationalist premises and pretensions of feminisms in the arts. Topics may include artists’ case studies, comparative analyses of feminisms in different contexts, decoding the legacy of Western feminist art in women’s art transnationally, reflections on the methodological challenges of intercultural research, and theoretical or empirical ruminations on dialogue/collaboration across generational and
geocultural borders.

Rutgers University Institute for Women and Art Momentum: Gender/Art/Technology 2.0
Judith K. Brodsky, Rutgers University Institute for Women and Art, Jbrodsky3ataol [dot] com
This panel welcomes papers that discuss how art with a feminist or transgender perspective toward technology helps change its content and points to a future in which populations presently
excluded from full participation in the high-tech achievements of contemporary society can share in the benefits of a more democratic technology. Momentum (www.momentum-women-art-technology.com) is a Rutgers University Institute for Women and Art initiative, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. An exhibition and conference are planned for spring 2014. The project began as a focus on women artists, but now, as a result of the research undertaken since the launch of this endeavor in 2009, includes transgender artists who are developing “trans-technology,” technology that supersedes the heterosexual binary context in which technology has developed.

Women’s Caucus for Art: The Maternal Body Exposed: Fecundity, Birth Control, and Countering Infertility in Contemporary Art
Rachel Epp Buller, Bethel College, rebulleratbethelks [dot] edu
Nude women abound in art—but rarely their swollen forms or leaking breasts. Adolescent bodies and models of virginal motherhood dominate the historical visual discourse, offering narrow visions of maternity. This session examines the ways in which the maternal body operates in contemporary art and visual culture. What does it mean to make visible the postpartum body? What are the artistic implications of today’s options to control pregnancy and infertility that redefine maternity in terms of
adoption, surrogacy, egg harvesting, or assisted reproduction? Art history’s idealization of the fertile, feminine body stands in stark contrast to the contemporary “problems” caused by the maternal body—for women in the workplace, or even in public. This open forms panel seeks participants for short presentations, roundtable discussion, and dialogue with the audience on the art of the contemporary maternal, as well as the challenges, strategies, and possibilities offered by the maternal body.

Studio Shots: Representations of Women as Artists
Sarah Evans, Northern Illinois University; and Elizabeth Ferrell, University of California, Davis. Email: sevansatniu [dot] edu and eferrellatdavis [dot] edu
Photographs of artists in the studio pose particular challenges to interpretation because they are difficult to categorize as representations. Are these photographs artworks or documents, products or representations of process? Should we view the figure in these photographs as a model or an artist? These questions become more complex when we consider that photos of women artists in their studios raise the issue of the legitimacy of their claim to an identity, work, and space that are traditionally gendered male. How do the photographs construct or negotiate the woman artist’s identity? How do the photographs represent the studio space and artistic labor? Are taking the photograph (the artist’s act of mediation) and the labor of posing acknowledged parts of that labor? As feminist scholars, we aim to examine the ways these images have been made to signify in the history of art, asking how and why specific photographs of women artists in their studios abet or vex feminist projects. We welcome papers by scholars and artists that engage this rich and perplexing
group of images.

Refiguring Masculinities in Conceptual Art
Tom Folland and Leta Ming, Santa Monica College. Email: tomfollandatgmail [dot] com and letamingathotmail [dot] com. Mailed copies preferred: Leta Ming, 2147 Alsace Avenue, Los Angeles,
CA 90016.
Although the display of women’s bodies in the art of the 1960s and 1970s generated fractious debates over identity and representation, the male body for the most part escaped such polemics, largely due to its status as a privileged site of power and artistic agency. How was this status reiterated or contested in conceptual art? This panel seeks papers that address the intersections of conceptualism and masculinity. Proposals need not be limited to artworks representing the body nor to work made
by men. Topics could include but are not limited to the ways in which artists reconfigured white male identity in response to racial politics; feminist critiques of gender and identity; and how the male body figured abstractly or through absence as an unmarked index of maleness.

Women, War, and Industry
Amy Galpin, San Diego Museum of Art, agalpinatsdmart [dot] org
The year 2014 marks the centenary of the beginning of World War I. In the last one hundred years, women’s lives have been drastically affected by war and industry. This session welcomes proposals that examine how artists have addressed the transformative, controversial, and often conflicting effects of war and industry on women. A survey of war posters created in the United States during World Wars I and II reveals that women were used to encourage community morale and to sell war bonds.
These images provide an interesting counterpoint to contemporary work. As the anniversary of World War I is observed, an occasion is presented to examine how conflicts, most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, have affected images of women and their relationship to war and industry. Papers examining cross-cultural links like the presentation of Mexican women revolutionaries by American artists, or comparisons between the portrayal of women in Europe and the United States during World Wars I and II, are also desired.

Historians of British Art: Queer Gothic: Difference and Sexuality in British Art and
Architecture

Ayla Lepine, Yale University; and Matthew Reeve, Queen’s University. Email: ayla [dot] lepineatyale [dot] edu and reevematqueensu [dot] ca
Over the past four centuries, the Gothic style and its range of significations (including pre-modernity, romanticism, the foreign, and Catholicism) have been frequently employed as a locus or a cipher for sexuality. Within broadly Anglican, Neoclassical visual cultures, the style could express non-normative,
minoritized experience, manifesting the values and ideals of an alternate subjectivity. Recent work in art history, literature, and gender studies has shown that from the Early Modern period to the present, Gothic aesthetics and ideas were appropriated and critiqued as an alternate historicist landscape within which diverse constructions and expressions of self could take place. Neo-Gothic aesthetics can be productively explored as a method of visual communication wherein queerness has been imagined,
signaled, displayed, and censored. For historians of British art, the Gothic Revival and queer theory are increasingly marshaled as ways of understanding the wider phenomena of sexuality, historiography, and resistance. This panel welcomes new research on queerness and the Gothic across architecture, art, and design, which may speak to emerging ways of seeing tradition, innovation, futurity, utopianism, and the tensions between survival and revival.

Queer Caucus for Art: Obsessive Occularity: Visualizing Queerness, Bodies, and Disability
Stefanie Snider, independent scholar, Snider [dot] Stefanieatgmail [dot] com
In light of recent scholarship on disability, vision, visuality, queerness, sex, and embodiment, this panel seeks to contemplate the ways in which visual representations can accentuate the connections between queer and disabled subjects. This panel calls for analyses of queer and/or disabled subjects in fine art, visual culture, and art-historical texts in order to ask questions such as: How are embodied queer and disabled sexualities represented in our visual field? How might queer studies, disability
studies, and visual studies productively inform each other as methods of research or approaches to pedagogy? How might representations of disability be queered and/or representations of queerness be “disabled”? How do we make the work of visual art production and art history ethical and socially just
when they privilege visual information that is not available to a substantial part of the population? Perspectives that concentrate on specific artworks, artists, and/or texts from a variety of cultures and time periods are especially welcomed.

Date: 
02/12/2014 - 02/15/2014
Additional information: 
Proposals for participation in sessions should be sent directly to the appropriate session chair(s) [read CfP Participation Guidelines for further instructions]
producers/organizers/editors/creators: 
CAA - College Art Association
Topic: 
Activism
Art
Disabilities
Gender studies
Global affairs & transnationalism
LGBT and queer issues
Parenting & motherhood
Representation of women
Riot Grrrl