Sex and the Writing Scene (GSA), Atlanta
Sex and the Writing Scene around 1800
(Panel Series at the Annual Meeting of the German Studies Assocation, September 26-30, sponsored by the Goethe Society of North America.)
Writing can be a medium of sex – a union that underwent a phase shift around 1800 with the new prominence of woman writers across Western Europe and the arrival of a new, feminized reading public. From Friedrich Schlegel’s amorously charged Lucinde to Karoline von Günderrode’s poetry of longing, desire, and attraction, male and female women writers alike began to write both about and through sex. To conjoin sex with the writing-scene encompasses both the literary arts’ thematization and practical imbrication of desire and attraction as well as the gendered conditions under which writing took place. To ask about the writing-scene more specifically foregrounds the question of how writing emerges from and constantly works through the social-sexual conditions that produce it. Furthermore, such questions probe the systematic character of sex and sexuality around 1800, and deal with the strange combination of directness and indirectness involved in this: writing and, as – or, perhaps, instead of – love, sex, desire, and reproduction. Placing a special emphasis on studying women writers and feminine writing-scenes, this panel series seeks contributions that bring together the many questions that fan out from ‘sex and the writing scene.’ Those include, but are not limited to:
- Women's scenes of writing and écriture féminine around 1800 (Bettina von Arnim, Karoline von Günderrode, Rahel Varnhagen, Caroline Schelling-Schlegel, and others)
- Sex and practices of writing around 1800 in theory (with Barthes, Berlant, Cixous, Freud, Kristeva, Kuzniar, Tobin, and others)
- Writing, morality, deviancy
- Writing and desire, writing and rejection
- Writing and queerness, queer writing
- Writing as ‘giving birth’, a form of reproduction, or even resistance to reproduction
- Women’s scenes of reading and reception; women publics / counter publics
- Writing and the literary salon
- Manuscript writing and editing, collaborative writing
Abstract submissions of no more than 500 words and a brief bio should be sent to Chris Hoffmann (cth2129@columbia.edu), Dennis Schäfer (ds67@princeton.edu), and Chloe Vaughn (cvaughn@carleton.edu) by January 31, 2024.