CFP: "New Feminisms: Mapping Out the Lines of Feminisms-to-Come."

Editors: Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, Grace Spinazzi, and Fanny Söderbäck. This book aims at creating an experimental space for new voices, thinkings and practices of feminism to be articulated—the ‘new’ entailing the capacity to move away from (though not necessarily reject) the ‘past’ of feminism as a moral, interpretative body of knowledge and experience, in an attempt not to dismiss the latter per se, but its status and workings as a prior enunciation, a savoir that engenders present and future imperatives to feminist thinking and practice. While showing respect to a feminist past (to which new feminism is perceived to be tied immanently), this collection will, at the same time, take a necessary and unavoidable distance from it, in the sense that this past of feminism has not been experienced in its actuality as a lived reality by the new generations of feminists. Thus, ‘new feminisms’ oppose becoming to (linear) history and seek to articulate new realities through the production of new discourses and thinking frameworks that express an intergenerational feminist relationality differently: A connection to the past, as we have inherited it through language, and a belief in the present through the activism of writing and acting. Rather than approaching today’s feminism(s) exclusively through the lenses of an established, recognised past (a reflecting back on feminist histories that inform the present of feminism(s) and question its future(s)) the emphasis will be put instead on the term ‘new’; hence, this collection will aim mainly at bringing into the fore feminism’s internal movements, trajectories, lines of transformation, dynamics of change that bring it about as a feminism-in-becoming. A becoming that does not simply and linearly pass through the established periodisation of the feminist movement (first, second and third waves) but zigzags and experiments with the aim to introduce a new politics of an open futurity (and not that of predetermined political goals), as well as, new political agencies (and new voices) on both levels of thinking and acting. The call for papers aims thus at contributions that will signal a radical break from a notion of feminism as being single, continuous with a clear agenda and a clear view of where we ‘should’ go and how we should move. It thus invites papers that will challenge and question views of feminism as a static methodology and of feminists as subjects of a certain kind, suggesting instead new feminist subjectivities that refuse to be discursively known so as to get re-cognition. Finally, it invites papers that will dare to ‘forget’ old vocabularies and will be willing to go through the risk and agony of thinking within new ones that replace strict notions of being with an experimental pragmatics of becoming. Such a new pragmatics is actualised through a different relating, a symbiotic relation with significant others-than-the-dominant-concept-of ‘WoMan’—relations that in turn produce ethical ecologies of new connections, which no longer apply to the humanistic discourse of political identities/communities but to a new materialising language of enfleshed alterities, and non-binaristic differences. Far from repeating/reproducing an oppositional, negative relation between "history/tradition" and "becoming/new," this project wishes to reflect on and explore the very sustainability of a productive tension between the two. Hence, in speaking of novelty and change, it addresses a difficult yet interesting question: How can one bring it about positively, that is, in ways that free us from tradition without the means of negation (e.g. without repressing, forgetting, rejecting it)? This is a central issue specifically for feminism; hence, the persisting question around which the book will develop could be articulated as follows: How can we, as young women, upcoming scholars, 'new feminists', but also those more established among us, move beyond and be critical of those feminists preceding us, without repeating the patriarchal move of burying/forgetting not just tradition per se, but specifically a feminist tradition/legacy? This constitutes for us an infinitely difficult question, and one that this book wishes to reflect on and explore in subtle and interesting ways. Far from being the product of a mere desire to shock or provoke, the product of a fetishistic obsession for the new, this collection comes to enhance and increase new voices within feminism that aim at de-territorialising feminism on both levels of practice and thinking—which means to remove it from the constants that define its formal operations and reproduce its authority. The plurality of the editorial voice(s) reflects the desire for a community-in-writing that resists institutionalisation and segregation, a desire for a writing-together-in-difference not under a common identity, but after common passions.

The book will invite papers on the following themes:

• New Feminist Epistemologies and Methodologies: Moving away from the dominance of discourse and social constructivism?
• From Inter-sectional to Trans-sectional Thinking: New feminist approaches to class, race, sexuality, ethnicity, globalization, and generation.
• New Feminist Languages: Challenging academic writing and thinking with new writing practices.
• New Feminist Aesthetics.
• Bringing Activism into Thinking: The relationship between academic and activist discourses (theory and practice).
• Space and Time: Exploring the relationship between corporeality and temporality, materialism and change, memory/forgetfulness and ethics.
• New Feminisms: A post-human feminism?

The deadline for submitting proposals is July 15, 2008. Proposals should be 300-500 words in length and sent in Word format to newfeminisms@gmail.com. Please include a brief bio with your proposal.