Welcome to SAAS

Call For Papers for Our Next Conference

"A Return to (What Never Was) Normal: Discourses of (Ab)Normalcy in US Culture, Literature, Arts, and Politics; Past, Present, and Future"

PANEL 4

4) "Disposable Bodies: Textual and Visual Narratives that Challenge the (Ab)Normalcy of Human Waste"
Panel Chair: Rocío Cobo Piñero, Universidad de Sevilla
E-mail: rociocobo@us.es  

The COVID-19 pandemic has aggravated the historical vulnerability and precarity of non-normative bodies in the United States, with a higher percentage of deaths among marginalized neighborhoods. As collateral damage of the economic advancement and the new global social order, there are whole communities that are turned into human waste. Among these, there are bodies traversed by processes of racialization, migration, sexualization, and dissident gender expressions. All these groups are frequently considered disposable lives, commodified, controlled, dispossessed, and often treated with extreme violence. This panel seeks to explore the textual and visual representations of the multiple forms in which non-normative bodies become othered in the United States, and consequently, stigmatized and disposable. But also, the manifold ways in which these othered bodies challenge the dominant representations by advocating for new forms of interdependencies and cultures of empathy and affect.

Prospective presenters are encouraged to submit proposals that might address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Narratives of human waste: past, present, and future
• (De)constructing disposable bodies
• Feminist responses to discourses of waste and disposability
• The Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality
• Queer bodies and forms of resilience
• Politics and grammars of exclusion
• Cultures of empathy and affect
• Resignification of value: precarity and beyond
• New forms of interdependencies

GUIDELINES FOR PARTICIPANTS

Abstracts of Proposals are to be e-mailed directly to the chair of the selected panel using this form. The deadline for submitting abstracts is October 15, 2022. Panel chairs are expected to accept/reject proposals and have panels set up by November 7.

Non-members of SAAS (of all nationalities) are welcome to participate in the conference, but will be required to pay membership dues for one year as well as the conference registration fee. Members of ASA (American Studies Association), AISNA (Associazione Italiana di Studi Nor-Americani), APEAA (Portuguese Association for Anglo-American Studies) and HELAAS (Hellenic Association for American Studies) need only pay the conference registration fee.

Further guideliness for participants can be found here.