WUNRN
Mapping Feminist Movements, Moments, and Mobilisations
2013 Conference - Feminist & Women's Studies
Association, UK & Ireland (FWSA) - http://www.fwsaconference.co.uk/
“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.