Lives Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre in the Americas, held from May 15-17, 2017 at York University in Toronto, is the third biennial conference of the International Auto/Biography Association Chapter of the Americas (IABAA). The conference brings together the leading scholars of autobiography, biography, and other forms of life writing, as well as new and emerging scholars, artists and practitioners of life writing, and graduate students.
Focusing on regional and hemispheric research and scholarship, the conference will explore the multiple lines that gendered lives in the Americas cross, both physical boundaries of national borders and intangible crossings of the established borders of gender, language, and genre. “Lives Outside the Lines” is a timely theme, given the importance of transnational movements triggered by globalization and given the popularity of multi-media and multi-genre experimentation that creates new possibilities and forms of self-representation. Papers and presentations delivered at this conference will investigate diverse representations and intersectional theorizations of embodiment and identity, with special attention given to marginalized lives, excluded subjects, traumatic histories, and invisible narratives. The event is dedicated to the celebration of the scholarship of York professor Marlene Kadar, a theorist and critic whose contributions have dramatically altered the field and expanded its interdisciplinary methods of study.
The conference is co-organized by IABAA and the Centre for Feminist Research at York University, in collaboration with the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, the Department of Humanities, and the Graduate Program in Critical Disability Studies at York University, the international journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and the Fulbright Specialist Program.
