Cross​-​Gendered Voices:

Appropriating, Resisting, Embracing

One​-​day Interdisciplinary Conference

Saturday May 31, 2008

Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies,

CAPITAL Centre, University of Warwick

Plenary Speaker:
Prof. Marina Warner, University of Essex

Call for Papers

The ‘Cross-Gendered Voices’ conference aims to investigate male writers’ use of the female voice, and
female writers’ use of the male voice, in order to examine whether the creation of new textual voices
reflects specific psychological, social, cultural, historical and political contexts as well as the author’s
own artistic ambitions. For example, borrowing a female voice Samuel Beckett attempts to assuage the
anxiety he felt over expressing grief and in breaking the social and cultural codification of mourning,
where the practice of mourning has typically been allocated to the female domain in the Western literary
tradition. Additionally, Virginia Woolf’s use of male voices can be seen as her attempt to “represent the
androgynous mind that she called for in ​A Room of One’s Own”​ , as Eileen Sypher writes. A further
example is provided if we follow Iris Murdoch’s first-person narrative in a novel like ​A Severed Head
where we find that a middle-aged bourgeois man who boasts of himself as a survivor is in fact a victim
and the most naïve person in the novel. Using subjective narration, through a male narrator in particular,
as Gillian Dooley states, Murdoch creates “veiled meanings, ironies and mixed messages”, challenging
the reader not to be deceived by the narration. As these cases suggest, whether it is a conscious or
unconscious decision, such cross-gendered voices create tensions, ambiguities and double meanings,
raising pertinent questions about the appropriation of, or resistance to, a gendered Other.

Points of departure for this examination include Janet Todd’s ​Gender and Literary Voice (1980) and,
more recently, ​The Routledge anthology of cross-gendered verse (1996) edited by Parker and Willhardt.
However, while these studies exist the cross-gendering of voice in literature has yet to be thoroughly
interrogated, especially in the contexts illustrated above. Consequently, the ‘Cross-Gendered Voices’
conference is an inclusive, interdisciplinary event that seeks to convene scholars, critics and writers from
various literary fields including theatre, film and creative writing.

We welcome papers of 20 minutes in length which may address, but are not limited to, the following
areas:

● Literary voice, gendered identities and representations of self/other

● Gender and sexuality in relation to culture, history, and politics
● Genre, gender and representations of self/other
● Intersections between literature and psychoanalysis
● Subject position, identity, nation, exile
● Memory and the poetics of loss
 ● Cultural politics of emotion
● Literary adaptation/reappropriation of myth by wo/men
● Cross-gendered popular cultural practices
● Cross-gendered performativity and embodied voice

Proposals for papers need to contain the following information:

● Name
● Affiliation
● Email Address
● Title of paper or presentation
● Brief description abstract/summary of paper or presentation (250-300 words)

Deadline for submissions: Friday 29​h​ February 2008.

Deadline for conference registration: Friday May 9, 2008.

Proposals, registration and enquires should be addressed to:

Dr. Rina Kim (Rina.Kim@warwick.ac.uk) and/or Dr. Claire Westall (C.L.Westall@warwick.ac.uk).