Call for Papers: Desiring Statues

 

Desiring Statues: Statuary, Sexuality and History Conference: University of Exeter, April 27, 2012

Deadline for Papers: Jan 10, 2011;  Keynote Speakers: Dr Stefano-Maria Evangelista (University of Oxford) andDr Ian Jenkins (British Museum)

Statuary has offered a privileged site for the articulation of sexual experience and ideas, and the formation of sexual knowledge. From prehistoric phallic stones, mythological representations of statues and sculptors, e.g. Medusa or Pygmalion, to the Romantic aesthetics and erotics of statuary and the recurrent references to sculpture in nineteenth – and twentieth-century sexology and other new debates on sexuality, the discourse of the statue intersects with constructions of gender, sex and sexuality in multiple ways.

As historical objects, statues give insight into changing perceptions of the sexed body and its representation; they tell stories of ownership and appropriation of sexualities across diverse cultural locations and historical moments. As an imaginary site, statues can serve to trouble the distinction between subject and object, reality and unreality, presence and absence, and present and past, thereby offering rich possibilities for thinking about the relation between individual and communal identities, sexuality and the past. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to investigate how statues facilitate this interplay of sexuality and history. It explores the numerous different ways in which statues –as historical and/or imagined artefacts– allow us to think about the past and its relation to sex, gender and sexuality.