CFP: Feminism’s Affective Imaginary: Narratives, methods, time

CAPACIOUS: Affect Inquiry/Making Space Conference 8 - 11 Aug 2018, Lancaster, Pennsylvania

This stream explores how the orientations of affect might make space for alternative conceptions of feminism’s narratives, methods, and temporalities. It draws from the productive dialogue that has emerged between feminist and affect studies especially in the new millennium, and attends to the discursive politics that shape the stories (Hemmings 2005, 2011) by which feminism has come to be known. The focus of this stream is twofold, and attempts to trace the affinities between its concurrent, overlapping lines of inquiry as follows. Alongside scholars such as Hemmings, Ahmed (2010, 2012), and Wiegman (2010, 2012, 2016), it first invites a self-reflexive gaze at how affect has saturated and sustained certain trajectories that compose the institutions of feminist thought, and in turn seeks to advance new perspectives on critical feminist praxis. Second, in following the work of scholars such as Browne (2014), Cvetkovich (2003, 2012), Freeman (2010), Hesford (2013), Holland (2012), Love (2007), and Scott (2011), it examines the imbrications of affect and time in the organization of feminist histories and knowledges. It continues to reveal the points of tension marking the structuring temporalities of feminism, and presents a diverse array of accounts that might extend the affective life of feminist time.

This stream welcomes papers that carve out space for contemporary modes of engaging with the affective imaginary of feminism. It uncovers the affective infrastructure behind dominant frameworks of feminism, and the transformative potential of affect itself for generating new ways of thinking and reading the multiplicity of feminist discourse. Here, the discussion is further opened to the affective temporalities of feminism that call into question the exclusionary parameters of feminist historiography. It draws on the inevitable centrality of affect for rethinking the pasts, present, and futures of feminism. This stream makes ethical and political interventions into existing feminist paradigms by being committed to perspectives that have traditionally been elided by liberal Western epistemologies. As such, it is particularly interested in scholarship that centers on decolonizing, transnational, or queer feminisms, and encourages the interdisciplinary insight that can be gleaned from the broadly defined fields of the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

Potential topics for this stream include, but are not limited to,

The mobilizations, or (re)orientations, of affect in:

• Approaches to decolonizing feminist thought
• Thinking comparative or global feminisms
• Theorizing queer feminisms
• Nonhegemonic modalities of feminism
• Counter-narratives of feminist theory
• New interdisciplinary frames of feminist theory
• The politics of feminist critique and knowledge production
• Practices of institutional/academic feminism
• Feminist pedagogical praxis
• New ways of ‘reading’ feminism
• Emerging feminist methodologies
• Feminist reconsiderations of historiography
• Genealogies and legacies of feminism
• The time or temporalities of feminist thought
• Feminism and its futures
• Feminist archival practices
• Feminist revolutions and cultures of protest

250-word paper abstracts can now be submitted. All papers must be submitted to capacious@millersville.edu. To aid with proper routing, please include STREAM #5 and 'Feminism's Affective Imaginary' in the subject-line of your emailed paper-abstract submission. The email attachment of your abstract should be in Word. Abstracts can be single-authored or co-authored. The final deadline for submissions is Thursday, March 15, 2018. For more information, please visit: http://capaciousjournal.com/conference/.