The Foucault Madness Collective is now accepting submissions for their September, 2014 conference.  The conference is free and open to the public.

Deadline for abstracts is August 15, 2014. Read the full CFP below.

Resisting Force and Discourse

Host: California State University, San Marcos

Date: Friday, September 26, 2014

Location: University Student Union, Ballroom

Keynote Speaker: TBA

The conference theme brings into critical light the way that bodies are marked and regulated by discursive practices and spaces, and institutional procedures. This operational force can take the form of juridical and normative practices.

Examples of juridical practices include but are not limited to current police protocols, immigration requirements, and sexuality-managing legislation. In their operation, these forces betray their impingement upon raced, gendered, and classed bodies. As such, the conference solicits papers that challenge neutral and objective neoliberal practices that ultimately regulate, disqualify, torque, and punish bodies at the margins of classification.

The conference theme further recognizes that the regulation of marginal bodies is not limited to institutional codes. Social norms are an essential disciplinary mechanism in the reproduction of the dominant order. Indeed, conformity to, or deviation from, norms designates which subjects are the proper recipients of accusation, disavowal, and injury. Denial of normative power can occur on multiple grounds including: sex work, living with HIV, body size, sexual orientation, and being gender-nonconforming. As such, the conference also invites papers that engage with the regulatory effects of normative power.

We highly encourage submissions from graduate students and advanced undergraduates for fifteen minute presentations. Academic disciplines and methodologies across the humanities and social sciences may be used. Research questions may include, but are not limited to:

• How is the policing and norming of marginalized bodies represented in literature and film? Or, newer cultural mediums, such as MMORGs and internet spaces?
• How do state regimes of punishment similarly besiege parolees and racial minorities?
• Does the U.S immigration system constitute a branch of biopolitical administration?
• What are the modern norms of surveillance that may be going unnoticed?
• How is the human body a political site (i.e., hunger strikes, self-branding, gender bending, trans politics)?
• What is the function of the citizen “Other”?
• Do social norms challenge the viability of HIV+ persons as subjects proper, leaving only a dangerous corporality?
• Which social norms are challenged through the undocuqueer identity marker and movement?
• Do all white subjects possess normative power?
• How do queer subjects challenge dominant procedures and norms through queer world-making practices? How is this portrayed in popular media, activism, etc.?
• Where do we find alternative networks, spaces, and autonomous zones? How are they constituted (i.e., spaces of reprieve and crisis heterotopias)?
• How do juridical and normative systems produce catastrophic violence that no one seems responsible for?
• Finally, critical theory and psychoanalytic approaches to the conference theme are welcome.

 Submissions: Please submit a 250 word abstract to foucault.madness@gmail.com by August 15, 2014. In the email body include your name, institutional affiliation, and email address.

For any questions about the conference, or our bi-monthly reading group, please contact us at foucault.madness@gmail.com.