The next issue of the Open Access anthropology journal Alterities on Women will include a variety of texts: ethnographic experiences, theoretical contributions, and genealogical perspectives. Some questions to be addressed are, but not exclusive to:
• Is there a renewal of feminist theoretical perspectives in anthropology and the social sciences? What forms of feminist analysis has such renewal taken?
• In the different spaces and communities where anthropologists work, how has the relationship between politics and women studies been materializing? Apart from the obvious gender inequalities, how do issues addressed by research on women manifest and take form in different social, political and cultural contexts?
• What is the state of feminist practices and actions? How does research on women translate into the complexity and diversity of issues pertinent to women’s movements?
Deadline for submissions: October 31, 2009. Altérités accepts texts in both English and French.
Presentation rules for submitted texts can be consulted at our website: http://www.alterites.ca/politique-en.html
Background:
First and Second wave feminism in the West, as theoretical and political movements, were articulated at the intersection of the individual and the collective through addressing issues such as, violence against women, reproductive and sexual health, social and economic inequalities, gender discrimination and oppression, amongst other politically relevant matters. Even with the absence of a unified theoretical voice, scholars in various fields, including anthropology, have frequently crossed paths, supporting feminists’ struggles, demands and debates by shedding light on lived inequalities, investigating the dynamics of women’s movements, establishing connections among schools of feminism around the world, as well as engaging critically with theoretical frameworks such as Marxism, post-structuralism, and more recently, subaltern studies, and queer theory.
In the last decade, feminist action has gone through a noticeable decline, at least in Western societies. The possible reasons for such decline are multiple and complex and can be attributed to perceptions of gained equalities for women, the rise of anti-feminist rhetoric, the internal fragmentation of feminist positions, and the postcolonial critique of the universalizing and hegemonic tendencies in Western-based feminist thought, among others. However, with the diversity and multiplicity of historical, cultural and political contexts, women as subjects, increasingly face today a wide array of complex issues, such as the recuperation of women’s rights discourse towards military, nationalist, and ethnic ends, women’s roles in liberal initiatives of development, migration, and post-war reconstructions, the sexualization of public space… etc. Such issues have implicated women in new forms of physical, economic and symbolic violence, as well as, provided emerging spaces for the expression of agency. Within this framing of issues regarding women, anthropology and scholarship are confronted with similar obstacles and questions facing feminist movements. One might therefore ask if a theoretical and political feminist renewal in these fields is still possible, probable or desirable?
Read the whole call for papers here: http://www.alterites.ca/appel.html