International conference at Siegen University, June 27-28, 2025
Deadline: June 5, 2025
Purity: A Conference
June 27-28 2025
University of Siegen, Germany
Organizer: Cat Ashton, Department of English
This interdisciplinary conference, to be hosted at the University of Siegen, Germany, will interrogate notions of purity from a broad range of perspectives. It takes inspiration from a series of suggestive studies that offer a critical framework for approaching purity—a word that evokes a sense of cleanliness, simplicity, and unity—as a productive cultural concept.
In The Symbolism of Evil, Paul Ricoeur writes, “Dread of the impure and rites of purification are in the background of all our feelings and all our behavior relating to fault” (25). And yet, asV.E. Schwab suggests in A Darker Shade of Magic, “Too much purity is its own kind of corruption” (193). Moreover, Ann McClintock notes in her book Imperial Leather, “Purification rituals prepare the body as a terrain of meaning, organizing flows of value across the self and the community and demarcating boundaries between one community and another. Purification rituals, however, can also be regimes of violence and constraint” (226). McClintock details how the marketing of soap invoked Victorian England’s colonial machinery and reinforced troubling notions about the relationship between cleanliness and whiteness. Roman Mars, meanwhile, describes how an early 20th-century health journalist considered white bread “chaste” and brown bread “defiled” in ways that also evoked racism. And in 2017, a study published in the journal Nature found that concerns about personal purity played a role in the anti-vaccine movement.
In Europe and North America, across the centuries, certain quests for purity, such as the alchemical search for gold, or Ignaz Semmelweis’s endorsement of handwashing for physicians, have expanded knowledge and saved lives. Other such quests, meanwhile, have engendered pseudoscience, moral panics, genocide, and other brutalities. This conference seeks papers that critically explore the tensions inherent in the theme of purity through the lenses of history, literature, religious studies, gender and sexuality studies, and popular culture. Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:
- The ethics of consumption, past and present
- Ideals of purity in religion
- Purity culture as a conservative movement
- Purity culture in leftist spaces
- Boundaries and borders, physical or conceptual, and the transgression thereof
- Purity and wellness discourse
- Purity, disability, and normate bodies and minds
- Dystopian/utopian engagements with purity
Full papers should be about 20 minutes long. Please send your proposals of 300 words, including a brief biography (no more than 100 words) to purityconference@outlook.com by June 5, 2025.