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THE FEMALE PRINCIPLE:
ECLIPSES AND RE-EMERGENCES

UTA Conference on the Suppressions
and Reassertions of The Female Principle
in Human Cultures.

KEYNOTES:
Martha Nussbaum, March 30
Drucilla Cornell, March 31
Eva Keuls, April 1
Nancy Tuana, April 1

University of Texas at Arlington,
March 30-April 1, 2000.

This interdisciplinary conference recognizes
the suppression of femaleness as a primary
meaning of Western and other cultures over a
long period. It seeks to identify, document,
account for, and interpret this suppression
via the forms it takes--many still concealed,
clandestine, underexplored--and their
counterforms, from early periods to the
present, and to identify and describe newly
developing practices that counter it.
Exposures, descriptions, and theorizations
of this suppression may be essential to
projecting a future for femaleness in human
societies.

We invite proposals from all fields of the
humanities and the social and behavioral
sciences. Papers may deal exclusively with
the forms of suppression (including
concealments of suppression),with the
figures or contents suppressed, with
examples of femaleness that elude suppression
or otherwise counter it, or with re-emergences,
or combinations of these, and may draw on the
following as a possible framework:

Bearing a positive social value in an
advanced Asian society as late as the seventh
century, the female principle sinks into
general anathema in the West by the time of
classical civilization, and into near
oblivion by the time of the early church.
There it remains, under powerful forms of
social repression, into the twentieth century.
Then, via numerous separate discourses,
pluralist thought creates a climate of
opinion in which femaleness can re-emerge
in literary, philosophical, religious,
and other languages under a positive sign.

Papers may be descriptive, and/or interpretive
or theoretical accounts of specific forms of
suppressions, such as the sexual; of forms
taken by coverups of suppression; of cultural
contexts mandating suppression; and of
examples that suppression overlooks--all these
in discourses and social practices worldwide.
Cross-disciplinary and new theoretical
approaches are encouraged.

Submission Information:
Please send statement of intent to
<a href="/scripts/wa.exe?LOGON=A3%3Dind9908%26L%3DARLIS-L%26E%3D7bit7BIT%26P%3D330122%26B%3D--%26T%3Dtext%252FplainTEXT%252FPLAIN%3B%2520charset%3DUS-ASCII%26pending%3D" target="_parent" >[log in to unmask]</a>  For proposal forms,
please see website:
http://www.uta.edu/english/hermann/2000/

Postal mail:
Conference on the Female Principle
Department of English 19035
University of Texas at Arlington
Arlington, Texas 760l9

Ph.  (817) 478-7794  or  (817) 272-2692