Romance Studies Graduate Student Conference- "Negotiating Spaces: Positions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Across the Arts"

Dominant historical conceptions of space are shaped by both physical and ideological mechanisms. These include a gendered division of public and private spheres, race and class-based segregations of urban development, and the policing of non-conforming sexualities. A "spatial turn" in the humanities and social sciences represents the effort to challenge these conceptions. The "Negotiating Spaces" conference proposes an examination of intersecting matters of gender, sexuality and race as they relate to the production and transformation of space. Of central concern is the "negotiation" of these problems by literary, artistic, and cinematic authors, both in terms of the subjects they represent and their interventions in form and genre