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Call for Papers "Difficult Dialogues" 2009 Annual Meeting National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) Atlanta, GA (USA) 12-15 November 2009 __________________________________________________ Conference Overview The National Women's Studies Association leads the field of womens studies in educational and social transformation. Established in 1977, NWSA has more than 2,000 members worldwide. Our annual conference regularly draws more than 1,200 attendees and is the only annual meeting in the US exclusively dedicated to showcasing the latest feminist scholarship. The 2009 conference will open on Thursday, November 12th with two pre-conferences hosted by the Program Administration and Development and the Womens Centers Standing Committees. These daylong events offer networking and professional development opportunities for womens and gender studies and womens center administrators. The General Conference begins on Thursday evening and concludes Sunday afternoon; it will feature concurrent breakout sessions, new member events, and professional development sessions for graduate students and junior faculty. Special events will include a book exhibition, Presidential sessions, and area excursions. Meeting Location The National Women's Studies Association 2009 annual meeting will be held at the Sheraton Hotel in midtown Atlanta, Georgia, from November 12-15, 2009. About the Theme Difficult Dialogues: NWSA 2009 will examine how feminist intellectual, political, and institutional practices cannot be adequately practiced if the politics of gender are conceptualized (overtly or implicitly) as superseding or transcending the politics of race, sexuality, social class, nation, and disability. Despite claims that everyone now does (or has always done) WS from intersectional and transnational perspectives, many of the ways in which the politics of both race and nation have been taken up in the field have been more nominal than transformative. Despite widespread changes in the WS curriculum, in feminist scholarship, and in WS institutional formations, there remains an ongoing struggle over what constitutes the legitimate terrain of feminist theory and inquiry, past and present. The Difficult Dialogues theme builds on Johnnella Butlers essays (beginning with her 1989 article in the Womens Review of Books) about the contested relationship among and between Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Womens Studies in the U.S. academy. Butler pinpointed a reluctance to engage questions of gender and sexuality in Black Studies and Ethnic Studies, and a reluctance to engage with questions of race and class in Womens Studies. NWSA 2009 identifies several thematic areas in which ongoing and new difficult dialogues across differences are urgently needed but frequently avoided, consciously or unconsciously: - Thinking, Speaking, and Working Margin to Margin - Intersectionality as Theory, Method, and Politics - Reconceptualizing Womens Studies within the Transnational - Negotiating the Politics of Memory - Womens Studies 40 Years Later: Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been? Theme 1: Thinking, Speaking, and Working Margin to Margin: In order to shift terrains of power and to engage in meaningful and transformative coalitions, feminist scholars of color continue to articulate the challenges of working across difference in contexts of marginalization. While moving from margin to center remains elusive, less visible are the complexities of thinking, speaking, and working margin to margin. To work margin to margin is to conceive of liminality as a coalitional space (and not as a singular or homogenous one), to acknowledge and address questions of power and oppression among and across different margins, and to engage in a new politics of difference that accounts for the difficulties women at the margins confront when they attempt to find common ground and build alliances. - What are some institutional and political challenges that hinder working and thinking margin to margin? - What are some practices and commitments that facilitate margin-to-margin work? - How does thinking margin to margin shift feminist theoretical and political terrains, past and present? - How does a margin-to-margin framework impact the WS curriculum? - In the academy, what relationships are fostered or hindered in working across academic marginswhat are Womens Studies institutional, curricular, and pedagogical relationships with Black/Africana/African Diaspora Studies, Ethnic Studies, Latino/a/Latin-American Studies, Asian/Asiaa American/Pacific Rim Studies, Disability Studies, Girls Studies, and Gay and Lesbian/Queer Studies? How are some of these areas differently institutionalized than others and how do we best account for power differentials and asymmetries margin to margin in the academy? Theme 2: Intersectionality as Theory, Method, and Politics A multiracial feminist approach to gender equity and liberation necessarily begins at the intersection or at the matrix of identities and of systems of domination. Intersectionality accounts for simultaneous privilege and oppression and refuses any hierarchy of oppressions or of identity. Intersectional feminist politics are coalitional and focus on a collective approach to freedom. In the United States, what we now call an intersectional model of feminist analysis and politics has a long trajectory: a complex genealogy of intersectionality as concept and practice can be traced among women of color feminisms in particular. Yet, has WS changed enough? Is there still a tendency toward gender universals? Are there still claims that intersectionality isnt viable or that one cant do it all or account for everything without being incoherent? Whose notions of coherence and incoherence hold sway in the field of WS? - In what ways is intersectionality as a theory, method, and/or politic still resisted in WS? - In what ways has intersectionality been embraced by the field? How has intersectionality helped to transform WS? - How does intersectionality shift the operative logics of feminist theory or alter normative feminist frameworks? - Though the term intersectionality is fairly recent, this approach has a much longer history: can we trace more comprehensive genealogies of intersectionality? - Intersectionality has been associated primarily with US women of color politics: has intersectionality accounted adequately for nation? Must intersectionality be bound by nation, or does it have a trans-national trajectory, historically and presently? Theme 3: Reconceptualizing Womens Studies within the Transnational In a time of heightened nationalism, ramped up surveillance, security, and war, transnational perspectives on womens studies and on feminist alliances and knowledges are imperative. A geopolitical approach to gender politics that does not homogenize gender within a reductive global sisterhood, but instead accounts for power asymmetries within the transnational, including past colonial relations and current neocolonizing practices, is likewise requisite if WS is to engage more meaningfully with questions about how race, nation, and ethnicity are foundational to understanding issues of gender and sexuality, past and present. - What does it mean to position the field of WS and feminist scholarship within a transnational frame, currently and historically? - How do globalization and neoliberal politics manifest within the academy and also within feminist theories and practices, presently and historically? - Does a focus on transnational feminisms sometimes operate as a means to evade or ignore more local issues of inequality and oppression, particularly when it comes to race? - How does thinking about the transnational within the local (e.g., indigenous sovereignty, immigrant communities, migrant politics) shift some key questions, frameworks, methods, and theories in WS? - What are some challenges of transnational work in WS? For example, how does Western hegemony continue to impact or impede cross-cultural feminist alliances? Whose notions of feminism, of feminist theory, and of feminist subjectivity remain operative? Theme 4: Negotiating the Politics of Memory Issues of public memory, collective memory, and personal memory have been central to feminist scholarship and activism. Focusing on the politics of memory raises questions about whose stories, voices, lives, and histories have been documented (in what ways and by whom) versus whose have been ignored (in what ways and by whom). Engaging with the politics of memory means examining who has been conceived as an agent of history and whose subjectivity has been acknowledged as agential: it also means documenting and exploring the ways in which marginalized groups have sought to shift or to transform memory. - How can we intervene in dominant/hegemonic stories and histories? What approaches aid in excavating and articulating subjugated perspectives? - Whose collective trauma or suffering is considered exemplary, and whose is marginalized or silenced? Whose legacies of resistance are remembered? Whose are not? - What are the meanings of silences, gaps and absences? Can everything be told or articulated? What politics lie within the unspeakable? How do we account for stories or histories that cannot be told? - How have art, music, literature, and other creative projects offered an important archive of memory and site of resistance? How have marginalized groups plumbed historys silences in the creative realm? - How do we best uncover, document, and think about the lives of radical women, past and present? How have radical women sought to intervene in the politics of memory, whether through political action, the creative arts, or in scholarship? - How do shifting historical contexts impact the meanings of resistance work? For example, how do we ensure that work borne of a particular struggle does not become, in a new context, co-opted or even a site of social control? - What are the politics of memory with regard to histories of feminist thought or to the origin stories of WS? Theme 5: Womens Studies 40 Years Later: Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been? 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the first WS program in the U.S: this occasion marks a pivotal moment in which to reflect on the state of the field and its practices, past and present. - How are the histories and origin stories of WS as a field and of feminist theory as a body of knowledge (differently) documented, narrated, and conceptualized? - Who claims WS, presently and/or historically? Who disclaims it, presently and/or historically? - How has feminist theory been reconceptualized? What counts as feminist theory in WS? - Has the feminist subject been adequately reconceived? - What do we name ourselves and why? (e.g., feminist studies, womens studies, womens & gender studies) - What are some difficulties within WS cross-generationally? What are some sites of connection across generations? - How has the WS curriculum changed, and how does it still need to be transformed, particularly the introductory course (Intro. to WS) and the Feminist Theory course? - Are there ways in which WS functions simultaneously as a site of social control as well as a site of resistance and transformation in the academy? NWSA invites all of those interested to submit proposals for panels, papers, workshops, and performances that represent the wide rage of intersectional and transnational scholarship in the US and beyond. Please note that all submitted proposals must address one of the five themes above. NWSA invites all of those interested to submit proposals for panels, papers, workshops, and performances that represent the wide rage of intersectional and transnational scholarship in the US and beyond. Please note that all submitted proposals must address one of the five themes above. Deadline to submit proposals: February 15, 2009. Program Co-Chairs: Beverly Guy-Sheftall, NWSA President and Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Womens Studies, Spelman College Vivian M. May, Associate Professor of Womens Studies, Syracuse University Contact: Natasha Waples, Director of Meetings National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) 7100 Baltimore Avenue, Suite 203 College Park, MD 20740 USA Phone: +1 (301) 403-0407 Email: [email protected] Web: http://www.nwsaconference.org/ __________________________________________________ InterPhil List Administration: http://interphil.polylog.org Intercultural Philosophy Calendar: http://cal.polylog.org
