Call for abstracts:
Transnational Feminisms: Revisioning Politics and Practice beyond Borders Inanna Publications, March 2010
The publication, 'Transnational Feminisms: Revisioning Politics and Practice beyond Borders', is designed as a graduate students' initiative, where researchers, writers and students of women/gender and multidisciplinary studies from diverse localities are invited to exchange views and thoughts on the question of how we enrich and transform our feminist theorizations and methods that go beyond West-centric paradigm.The purpose of this journal is to contribute to York University’s 50th anniversary and history of commitment to international and interdisciplinary nature of academic community building, by creating dialogues among feminist scholars from diverse cultural and social backgrounds. We aim to create a space for dialogue about the links and tensions between transnational feminist theory and analysis, research, political change and social justice work.
How and why have feminists taken up the ‘transnational’?
Transnational feminist analysis has developed through continuous attempts to articulate a feminist framework that addresses, rather than harmonizes, women’s positionalities within ‘uneven, often unequal, and complex’ relationships. These relationships are produced and continuously transformed by multiple links between patriarchies, colonialisms, racisms, and other forms of domination (Grewal and Kaplan, 2000). Transnational feminists have attempted to dismantle conventional state-centric approaches to globalization, to question and subvert borders (of space, identity, discipline), and to problematise uncritical feminist multiculturalism and internationalism which fails to engage with the historical relationship of feminism to nationalism, imperialism, and racism. Crucial methodological and epistemic interventions by transnational feminists challenge how academics and activists understand the politics of representation, of advocacy, identity and self-reflection, embodiment, positivism, Marxism and post-structuralism. We aim to gather those who use transnational feminist frameworks, to share research-in- progress, projects, hopes, strategies and dilemmas, and to open space for dialogue about how we are engaging with this theory and what sort of work we want to practice/produce.
Multiple Questions and Lines of Critique:
Why has transnational feminism not been taken up in meaningful ways in academia? Does this question assume that the meaning and breadth of what constitutes transnational feminist theorization and methodology have crystallized/ stabilized? Has transnational feminism been a space of interrogating various feminisms (liberal, Marxist/ socialist, etc)? Or, how is the space of transnational feminist philosophy and praxis something more? What are the divides and tensions between philosophy and praxis in transnational feminism? How are we actually addressing the academic/activist divide? How are we attempting to challenge the reproduction of ‘the native informant’ (Trinh, 1989; Spivak 1999), the problematic adoption of ‘politics of location’ (Kaplan, 1994), the human rights ‘saviour’ narrative (Alexander, 2005), the ‘terrorist’ (Puar, 2004)? How and where are our bodies moving? What kinds of borders are we crossing or not crossing? What does it mean to think and act intersectionally, materially, post-colonially? How do we work with queer theory? What is possible in the context of rapidly neoliberalising universities, labour structures, politics? How does the “commodification of knowledge” fit into both the need for and critique of transnational feminism? How does whiteness work in transnational feminism? How does a decolonization framework work within transnational feminism? How do Indigenous perspectives in transnational
feminism necessitate the rethinking of “nation”? Can we begin to imagine transnational feminism without centering “nation”? What kinds of communities can we build (or is there the possibility of a ‘we’)? And what does this mean for the theory, methodologies, agency, and possibilities for social transformation within transnational feminism(s)?
Potential areas for submission:
-Feminist methods, ethics, and research in a transnational framework: How do we do it? What is at stake?
-Re-examining the ‘West,’ racism and coloniality in feminist studies
-Movements and flows of bodies, ideas, and desires
-Queering the transnational/ transnational approaches to sexuality
-Transnational cultural production and popular culture
-Representations, truth, hybridity: thinking transnationally in film, novels,
memoir, testimony
-‘Whiteness’ in a transnational context
-Language, translation and speaking (out/with/against/ for/about) : questions of
knowledge production, sharing, appropriation, advocacy
-Negotiations with human rights paradigms, sovereignty, gender-mainstreamin g
-Gaza, Eelam: transnational feminist approaches to violence, colonization and occupation
-Media representations of conflict, spectacle, trauma
-War, diaspora and activism: home, land, “security” and “war zones”
-Modes and processes of political economies in multiple ‘sites’; i.e., gender and social reproduction in (post)Socialist / (post)communist states, transitional justice frameworks
-Transnational feminism in/and women’s studies: questions, problematics and
possibilities in disciplinary boundaries
Please also feel free to submit abstracts outside these themes.
Submission Guidelines:
Abstracts should be between 250-300 words. Please also include a brief bio (100 words) along with your name, contact address, and institutional affiliation. Please send your complete abstract to transfem@yorku. ca, by July 30, 2009. We might be able to consider late submissions, but priority will be given to those who meet the deadline.
The committee will contact you by mid-September 2009. Please feel free to contact the conference organizing committee at transfem@yorku. ca should you have any questions.
2009 Transnational Feminist Publication Organizing Committee
Graduate Programme in Women’s Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada
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