Call for papers – Trans/forming the Machine: Feminist Interventions in Digital Poetics – deadline 1 November 2016

If a poem is a machine to think with (Baldwin), how might the innovative methodologies, praxis, and ideology of digital poetry rethink feminist practice? Many women writing electronic literature have used the convergence of both intensely personal and highly impersonal data-gathering technology to create a unique hermeneutical fabric for investigating feminist navigational politics through digital mediums. Writers as diverse as Ana Maria Uribe, M. D. Coverley, Kate Pullinger, Shelley Jackson, and J. R. Carpenter all pose significant feminist interventions in digital poetics. In this panel, we would like to examine how digital technologies and interfaces offer women, in particular, a means to challenge the tired exclusionary politics of poetic conceptualism that have dominated experimental literary circles for decades.

We are particularly interested in papers that consider how feminist theories of diaspora, queerness, Indigeneity, race, and nation are represented within, and transform the articulation of, digital poetics and its practices. Along these lines, how can the tools of digital technology be used to further theoretically critical and culturally progressive poetic projects, specifically for and by women? We are interested in both traditional conference papers and presentations of digital poetic projects that engage the aforementioned questions.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

– Politics and poetics of digital mapping

– Spatial technologies and locative media

– Poetry-bots, generative poetry, hypertext fiction

– E-lit and embodiment

– Politics of interface design

– Digital challenges to subjectivity

– Collaborative authorship and communal writing

Please send the following to Kate Siklosi () and Dani Spinosa (): A file containing a 300 to 500-word paper proposal, without personal identifying marks; A file containing a 100-word abstract and a 50-word biographical statement; the 2017 Proposal Info Sheet available on the ACCUTE website.