November 15-17, 2013, Université de Montréal

Keynote Speaker

Patricia T. Clough (CUNY, New York)

 Invited Speakers

Evelyne Ledoux-Beaugrand (Ghent University, Belgium).

Belén Martín-Lucas (University of Vigo, Spain)

Catherine Mavrikakis (Author, Université de Montréal, QC)

Gail Scott (Author, Université de Montréal, QC)

Maïté Snauwaert (University of Alberta, AB)

Organizing Committee

Marie Carrière, Dir. of the Canadian Literature Centre (U. of Alberta)

Libe García Zarranz, 2010 Trudeau Scholar/ English and Film Studies (U. of Alberta)

Simon Harel, 2009 Trudeau Fellow/ Dir. du département de literature comparée (U. de Montréal)

Daniel Laforest, Modern Languages and Cultural Studies (U. of Alberta)

Following the success of the first international conference on “Women’s Writing in Canada & Québec Today” celebrated in Banff last October 2012, the organizing committee is now seeking papers for a second bilingual event that will take place in Montreal in the fall of 2013. Focusing on the first decade of the 21st century, this conference will look at points of intersection between contemporary Canadian and Québécois women’s writing and Affect Studies, an interdisciplinary field that has grown popularity across the Humanities and the Social Sciences in the last two decades (Berlant 2011; Clough 2007; Stewart 2007; Sedgwick 2003; Massumi 2002). Sharing the urge expressed by many theorists of affect, this conference aims to expose the multiple directions in which contemporary Canadian and Québécois women writers are contributing to the transformation of affect into an ethical, aesthetic, and political matter. Affect theorists have insisted on interrogating not what affect is but what affect does. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) and her “model of sociality of emotions,” Sara Ahmed claims that “emotions are not simply something ‘I’ or ‘we’ have.

Rather, it is though emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others” (10). Affects then are not property; they are not owned or possessed by subjects but circulate between bodies constantly generating new encounters through spatial and temporal processes of approximation, disorientation, and reorientation (Ahmed 2004). Significantly, discussions of affective spatialities and temporalities occupy a central position in the field of literature.

By urging participants to address Canadian and Québécois women’s writing in light of recent interventions in the field of Affect Studies, this conference ultimately attempts to provide some tentative answers to the following two questions: How does contemporary women’s writing in Canada and Québec mobilize feelings and emotions to transform social realms? In which ways are these women writers contributing to the transformation of affect into an ethical and political matter?

Proposals, submitted in English or in French, may address any form of contemporary writing by women in Québec or Canada, and focus on (but are not limited to) the following:

Contemporary turns in the Humanities:

– the affective turn

– the ethical turn

– the material turn

Affective communities

Ordinary affects

Ugly feelings

Affective spaces and encounters

Circuits of shame

Loss and trauma

Affecting temporality

Cruel optimism

The politics and poetics of touch

Ethical choices and practices

Rethinking subjectivity and agency through affect

Affecting queer writing

The body politic

Economies of affect

Corporeality and embodiment

Interdisciplinary pedagogies

Social movements and women’s writing

Feminism(s) today meet affect theory

We particularly welcome submissions in the following formats: 3-4 people panels, 10-minute

individual papers, posters, or pecha kucha presentations.

Please send a 200 word proposal and a 75 word bio to cqww@ualberta