WUNRN

http://www.wunrn.com

 

http://www.fwsaconference.co.uk/

 

The Lady Doth Protest…

Mapping Feminist Movements, Moments, and Mobilisations

 

2013 Conference - Feminist & Women's Studies Association, UK & Ireland (FWSA) -  http://www.fwsaconference.co.uk/ 

Call for Conference Papers

“The Lady Doth Protest…Mapping Feminist Movements, Moments, and Mobilisations”

Women have long participated in and led a wide variety of protests, feminist and otherwise. Their historical participation in movements against, for example, colonialism and militarism; for equal rights and civil liberties; on livelihood issues and against capitalist expansion has routinely thrown up questions about feminist knowledge, praxis, and personal-public life. More recently, the visibility of women on a global scale in the ‘Arab spring’, the North American ‘occupy’ movement and activist marches like the ‘Slut Walk’ and ‘Muff March’ phenomena, makes revisiting debates on women and protest apposite. At the same time, the ‘war on terror’, the so-called death of multiculturalism in Europe, the racialization of religion, and women’s global participation in fundamentalist mobilisations and armed struggle raises new questions concerning the interstices between race, religion, class, sexuality and citizenship. These questions that feminism(s) needs to (re)consider whilst contextualising women in protest and protest more generally lie at the heart of this conference theme. We seek to critically reflect upon the concept of feminist protest – its discourse, image and impact, and to examine the possibility of creative feminist engagement across a spectrum of moments, movements and mobilisations.

We conceive of the term ‘protest’ in its widest sense as both formal and quotidian contentious action existing in a variety of practices including activism, critical pedagogies, literature, film, technologies, art and aesthetics – all of which coalesce around the challenge they mount to multiple hegemonies. By unpacking the concept of protest and expanding existing notions of the political through a feminist lens, we seek to understand how feminist protest, in particular, responds to and emerges within/in spite of, the challenges of our contemporary world. In exploring feminism’s relationship with a wide variety of contemporary concerns, social movements and across a range of disciplines, we invite papers from across the arts, humanities and social sciences, that aim to address the possibilities and complexities of feminist mobilisation within the socio-cultural, political, economic, and pedagogic specificities of the temporal spaces we currently find ourselves in. Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:

• Women and protest: theoretical, historical, and contemporaneous concerns;
• Sexual and gendered economies of neoliberalism, recession, and austerity;
• Gender, securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism(s);
• The impacts of new forms of (transnational) activism and protest politics on feminism; connecting theory and practice;
• Critical pedagogy and feminist scholarship in times of continuity and change;
• The poetics of protest: literature, music, film, and art;
• Race, Class, Gender and the State;
• Spirituality, Faith, and Religion;
• Feminist temporalities in protest;
• The language and rhetoric of protests, movements and feminist mobility;
• Non or anti-feminist protest;
• Sexuality and protest, and heteronationalisms

Please send panel proposals (600 words) and 250 word abstracts for twenty-minute papers to the conference organisers at: conf2013@fwsa.org.uk

Panels proposals should be sent by 30 September, 2012 and individual paper submissions by 30 October, 2012.