Date: Sun, 29 Aug 1999 14:06:52 -0500
From: Luanne Frank <lfrank-AT-uta.edu>
Subject: Conference Announcement & Call for Papers: THE FEMALE PRINCIPLE


UTA Conference on the Suppressions and Reassertions of
The Female Principle in Human Cultures.

University of Texas at Arlington, March 30-April 1, 2000.

This conference recognizes the suppression
 of femaleness as a primary meaning
of Western and other cultures over a long period.
 It seeks to identify, document,
account for, and interpret this suppression via
 the specific forms it takes from
 and describe newly developing
practices that counter it. Exposures, descriptions,
 and theorizations of such
suppression may be essential to projecting a
 future for femaleness in human
societies.

We invite proposals from all fields of the humanities
 and the social and behavioral
sciences. Papers may deal exclusively with
suppressions (including concealments
of suppression) and their cultural contexts,
with the figures or contents
suppressed, with examples of femaleness
 that uncharacteristically elude
suppression or otherwise counter it, or
with re-emergences, or combinations of
these, and may draw on the following as a
 possible framework:

Bearing a positive social value in an advanced
Asian society as late
as the seventh century, the female principle
 sinks into general
anathema in the West by the time of classical
 civilization, and into
near oblivion by the time of the early church.
 There it remains,
under powerful forms of social repression,
into the twentieth century.
Then, via numerous separate discourses,
pluralist thought creates a
climate of opinion in which femaleness can
 re-emerge in literary,
philosophical, religious, and other languages
 under a positive sign.

Papers may be descriptive, and/or interpretive
 or theoretical accounts of specific
forms of suppression, such as the sexual; of
forms taken by coverups of
suppression; of cultural contexts mandating
suppression; and of femaleness
eluding suppression or otherwise countering it--
all these in discourses and social
practices worldwide. Cross-disciplinary and
 new theoretical approaches are
encouraged.

Submission Information:
See the following page or send inquiries to:
lfrank-AT-uta.edu

Postal mail:
Conference on the Female Principle
Department of English 19035
University of Texas at Arlington
Arlington, Texas 760l9

Ph. 817-272-2692


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