CFP for Transromanticism Volume
CFP for Transromanticism Volume: Romantic Trans Phenomenologies
Editors: Elizabeth Fay (U Mass, Boston) & Kate Singer (Mount Holyoke College)
The Romantic period in Britain marks a shift in how the body-mind could be experienced, internalized, and theorized. Empiricist frameworks that spoke to gender, sex, and sexuality were revised by discoveries in medicine and science, including budding or transformed discourses of cultural geology, racial anthropology, anatomy and physiology, to name a few. More dramatically, the French Revolution initiated a period in Britain of affective urgency, joyful transformation, and iterative bodily and affective misprisons. Authors furnish a variety of phenomenological expressions in experiences of proprioception, orientation to a changing set of relational objects, euphoria, bodily misfit, among others. Traversing both the arts and the sciences, accounts of negative affective states such as melancholia and phenomenological states such as malaise signaled discontent (dis-content, disaffection) with the fit between external conventions and internal experience. Alternatively, other accounts of gender-crossing, such as the widely popular stories of female sailors, affirm, albeit sometimes momentarily or with ideological verve, movements in bodily states.
This volume seeks to describe, in all its variegation, both a period (a set of queer spacetimes) that enable orientations, affectively and phenomenologically, as well as a trans analytic methodology for reading those bodily maneuvers. These dispositions open the possibility that the Romantic period functions as a queered space of resistance, by harboring the indigestible nugget of queer experience, to progressive histories that seek to fold heterogeneity into their narratives. Focusing on phenomenology, with its attendant affective bodily states, likewise aims to expose the more fluid and capacious ways sex and gender were felt in the Romantic period, as well as to contribute to the language currently available to describe the period’s extremely diverse understandings of embodiment and relation. Likewise, this project endeavors to evince a sense of the Romantic period that is substantially different from earlier eighteenth-century libertine models and later nineteenth-century reifications of gender binarism, as one of transition, recursivity, reimagining, speculation, and reflexive theorization.
We seek papers of 8-10,000 words that: address trans lives and trans histories during the British Romantic period; envision Romanticism through a nonlinear framework of queer temporalities and periodizations; work through a transanalytic that accounts for affective and/or phenomenological orientations; query periodization as a historical and conceptual problem with and through trans lives/writing/experience reframings; explore resistances available in bodily comportments; explore affective and disaffective states in trans writing during the period; examine trans lives/histories/writing as analytics or refractions of “Romanticism.”
We also seek position pieces and brief theoretical statements for shorter essays of about 3,000 words.
Additional topics for either length might include:
● Religion and transcendence
● Theories or figurations of mind-body distortions, aberrancies, arrivals, manifestations, changeability
● Bodily histories, comportments, performativities, transitions, labor
● Negative and positive affects
● Alternative (literary) histories of science
● Allies, families, partners, support systems, alternative family and reproductive structures
● Trans ecologies, landscapes, spaces
● Trans rhetorics, figuration, and generic expression
● Medical anxieties, interventions, trauma
● Euphemisms and slang terms used by or about non-conforming persons or relationships
