Women Writing Rape: Literary and Theoretical Narratives of Sexual Violence
Saturday 28th April 2007ThanksThank you to all the speakers and delegates who came on Saturday 28th April and who made the conference such a success. The day was refreshing, stimulating and heartening and we were very glad to see so many women from different disciplines and backgrounds contributing to the discussions. We are still going to try to maintain this website and the conference blog, so feel free to check these spaces for calls for papers or articles related to our topic. 
Artwork (Elsewhere) by Sue Williams from the Wish U Were Here Series.
INTRODUCTION This symposium emerges from the failure of feminism as an academic discipline in theorising rape. It seems to have been left to women writers to interrogate the representation of women and rape and this symposium aims to analyse how these writers have subverted terms such as ‘victim’, ‘experience’, ‘survivor’, ‘active’ and ‘passive’. This symposium aims to bridge ‘academic’ and ‘creative’ approaches to literature with a fully integrated range of activities. The keynote speaker, Dr. Ananya Jahanara Kabir of University of Leeds, will be speaking on the politics and polemics of how rape is represented in contemporary South Asia. Her talk is titled: 'Double Violation? (Not)Talking about Rape in Contemporary South Asia'. There will be two panels of speakers on the topic of women writing rape. In addition, there will be a reading of cutting-edge creative work by the novelist Patricia Duncker and a creative writing workshop. The workshop leader, Zoë Brigley is a member of the Warwick Writing Programme where she teaches on The Practice of Poetry and Modes of Writing. The workshop will include a variety of stimuli including media articles, sound recordings and film clips to encourage the delegates to undermine stereotypical positioning of men and women in predatory and submissive roles. The event is being organised by Sorcha Gunne and Zoe Brigley. The funding for this symposium has been provided by the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association (FWSA), and from within the University of Warwick, by the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, the Centre for Caribbean Studies and the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender. The deadline for abstracts has now closed. The deadline for registration is Tuesday 24th April 2007. |
LinksEnglish and Comparative Literary Studies Centre for the Study of Women and Gender About the Artist,Sue WilliamsThe artist, Sue Williams, has kindly offered the symposium use of her image, Elsewhere, as a kind of emblem for the issues at the heart of the event. Iwan Bala writes of Williams: "The more one looks the less the works seem directed at the viewer - they are certainly not for our titillation - and the more they begin to resemble a diary. A confusing set of events and emotions are being presented, dare we ask more? A private world has somehow escaped, larger than life into the public domain. Is there a traumatic event being dredged up from the memory, partly hidden?" Sue Williams writes: "The words that come to mind, apart from vulnerability, are sexual awareness, sexual control, provocation, encouragement, naivety, punishment, guilt. My paintings are my diaries, a visual interpretation of the diary. Through the visual image, words included, I relate to personal experiences and thoughts and in doing so I also connect to broader "political" comment." |
