Autobiography and Sexuality. Contributions are invited for a collection of essays, tentatively titled Big Sex, that explores how academic institutions as the big Other(s) shape and/or influence our sexual identity and practices. Essays should be situated at the intersection of autobiographical narrative and theoretical discourse; that is, they should not simply document a personal experience or history but reflect upon it in relation to the discourses or symptomatics of academic institutions (grade school, high school, graduate school, libraries, etc.) and spaces. Possible topics might include but are certainly not limited to the following: with(in) what mechanism(s) one operates as a sexual being in and for the classroom, in and for the academy at large, in and for one's scholarship (repression? exhibitionism? voyeurism? hysteria? masquerade? etc.); sex-text trouble or censorship in the classroom; pleasures of the text or the erotics of reading and/or writing; the beating phantasy (a la Freud's "A Child is Being Beaten); the academy as sexually oppressive and/or liberating; fetishizing texts, discourses, teachers; classroom sex-trauma/sex-drama; who and/or what is considered "sexy" by and in the academy; break-ups caused by and/or relationships created by one's participation in the academy; what academics talk about when they talk about sex; sexual awakening(s), conflict(s), performance(s), play(s), reckoning(s), tension(s) that emerge in response to various theoretical, pedagogical, and/or political stances.
Send completed essays (20-30 pages in length, MLA style) by
April 30, 2001, to Becky McLaughlin, Department of English, University of South Alabama, Mobile, AL 36688. Please do not send e-mail attachments.
E-mail queries, however, are welcome (bmclaugh@jaguar1.usouthal.edu).