welcome
We are glad to announce that the ninth biennial meeting of the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society (IASSCS) is entitled "Sex and the Marketplace: What’s Love got to do with it?" and will take place from 28th to 31st August 2013 in Buenos Aires-Argentina. This conference is co-organized by the Study Group on Sexualities (GES for its initials in Spanish), at the Instituto Gino Germani, School of Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina and hosted by Professor Mario Pecheny.
The main focus of the upcoming IASSCS International Conference will be the increasing commodification of social and sexual relationships, in both sexual/erotic and emotional dimensions. The commodification of sexuality, in turn, calls for new attention to the political economy of the body, analysis of the market value of bodies and of the activities in which those bodies are involved, and of the multiple markets and marketplaces in which genders, sexualities, health and rights are produced and reproduced.
Conference themes will explore how the reasoning behind capitalist production can colonize not only sexual exchanges, but also even sexual politics and academic production. Related themes include: the long-existing links between politics and sexuality and the intention of the political sphere to control this field; and the ambiguity of the field of sexuality, where asymmetric relationships take place. Finally, the conference will focus on the discourse and practices of ’romantic love’, which seems to have survived the collapse of great modern discourses towards the end of the twentieth century. Presentations will assess to what extent such discourse is also market-bound (or not), and the ways in which it might provide a potentially strategic basis for the discussion of sexual rights.
The official language of the conference is English. However there will be small number of sessions in Spanish/Portuguese (without simultaneous translation) in the program, to accommodate discussions focused on the region.