An International Conference at the University of York,

19-20 April 2024

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Featuring a virtual Q&A with Carmen Maria Machado 

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a keynote lecture from Professor Simon Stern

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*Conference Programme*

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Bringing together literary critics, legal historians, and creative practitioners, this conference will provide the first in-depth analysis of literary representations of coercive control. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers or creative submissions that draw out ways in which coercive control has been identified and interrogated by writers from the 1800s to the present day. 

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In 2015, domestic violence legislation in England and Wales was extended to include ‘threats, humiliation and intimidation’ and ‘a range of acts designed to make a person subordinate and/or dependent’. This conference will show how the crime of coercive control has a long and disturbing history in fiction, poetry, and drama, helping to shape understandings of psychological abuse within the academy and beyond. 

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The conference will examine the complex dialogue between literature and legal change, exploring how narratives first anticipate legislation, and then help to publicise, understand, and enact it.​ By investigating imaginative writing as a significant yet often overlooked or trivialised driver of legal reform, the conference will develop cross-disciplinary research methodologies and generate scholarship with genuine social and political impact. Key questions may include:

 

• How have narratives of surveillance, regulation, and sustained psychological abuse anticipated and underscored legal change?

• How do narratives of coercive control empower readers and amplify the voices of survivors?​

• How have textual strategies of surveillance and regulation driven different fictions, from Victorian marriage plots and neo-Gothic mid-century melodramas to contemporary narratives of unequal unions? 

• How might realist authorial omniscience and postmodern textual trickery be read as metafictional meditations on coercive control? 

 

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

 

• representations of coercive control in fiction, poetry, drama, or life writing;

• representations of coercive control in other media forms, including radio, film, television, podcasts, and visual arts and cultures;

• the psychological, social, or educational impact of imaginative literature about coercive control;

• intersectional approaches to research on coercive control;

• coercive control in LGBTQ+ relationships and literature;

• ways in which narratives of coercive control anticipate or foreshadow legislative change; 

• ways in which legal changes might generate plots of coercive control.

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