[Nicole Seymour]

Hi All,

Please see the CFP below for an MLA 2016 panel I’m organizing with Clare Echterling. Circulate as you see fit. Thanks!

Best, Nicole

 

Transgender Studies, Ecology, and the Environmental Humanities

For this panel, organized by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, we invite proposals for papers that place transgender studies and the environmental humanities into critical conversation, thus attending to existing gaps in scholarship when it comes to the relationships among “trans(gender),” “ecology,” and “environment.” For example, while materialist ecocriticism has shown concern for trans phenomena, such as the “trans-corporeality” discussed by Stacy Alaimo, that work has tended to reject the linguistic and discursive turns that have been so important to transgender scholarship and activism. And while queer ecology has brought attention to the normativity of much environmental science and art, while showing us how sexual and environmental relationships are organized together, it has rarely attended to the specificity of transgender experiences and perspectives. Meanwhile, transgender studies scholarship has taken interest in both proliferating meanings of “trans” beyond gender and taking up questions of the animal, but this scholarship has not paid much attention to environmental questions per se.

Proposals might speak to the above state of affairs in numerous ways — such as considering what the “material turn” in ecocriticism might mean for transgender studies scholarship, or theorizing what “trans” as a category brings to the environmental humanities (and vice versa). Other proposals might offer critiques of transphobia, cisnormativity, and cissexism in environmental science, discourse, or activism; take transgender studies approaches to environmental justice issues; or focus on transgender perspectives on/in “nature writing” and other environmental literatures.

Please send 250-word abstracts and CV to Clare Echterling (cechterling@ku.edu) and Nicole Seymour (nseymour@fullerton.edu) by March 15^th.

[Jeffrey Cohen]

This session looks terrifically good — what a timely and important topic. Thanks for posting the CFP here.

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