Signs Special Issue: RAGE

Andrew Mazzaschi Announcement
Location
Massachusetts, United States
Subject Fields
African American History / Studies, Women's & Gender History / Studies, Anthropology, Sexuality Studies, Literature

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

Special Issue: RAGE

Editors: Sarah Haley (UCLA), Carla Kaplan (Northeastern University), and Durba Mitra (Harvard University)

Deadline: September 15, 2019

Full call for submissions and submission instructions: http://signsjournal.org/for-authors/calls-for-papers/#rage

Feminists are raging.  This special issue will consider our rage as a global, complex phenomenon that mandates interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis. Rage is historical. Rage can be deeply exclusionary, recognizable as a legitimate emotion for only a privileged few. It is an instrument of patriarchy as well as a potential feminist resource. Rage shapes moral claims for racial justice, movements against gender violence, and opposition to the global rise of authoritarian regimes.  Rage can do so in ways that both extend and depart from the histories of feminist and queer raging that marked late-twentieth-century radical feminism, global organizing against HIV/AIDS, and against police brutality. Rage is embedded in the fabric of institutions, in public policy, and in conservative rhetoric. It animates white supremacist and patriarchal violence as well as feminist resistance.  Women’s rage has historically been medicalized, pathologized, and perceived as antinormative and antisocial. Yet rage also marks transgressive arenas such as black feminist culture, thought, and politics. Black feminist theory has offered critical insights on rage’s eloquence, uses, and violent racialization, while public figures such as Serena Williams force us to grapple with rage as public refusal, as well as a labor resource and commodified affect. This special issue seeks to further explore rage as a conundrum, or double agent, operating both for and against feminism: visceral, transgressive, galvanizing, and socially constructed.

Signs particularly welcomes bold essays that engage the complex dynamics of rage as personal and social, affective, and political, and that consider rage in empirical and theoretical ways.  These essays should consider broader affective, political, social, and historical contexts. Signs encourages essays that address large questions, debates, and controversies without employing disciplinary or academic jargon. We seek essays that are forceful, passionate, strongly argued, and willing to take risks. We are interested in essays that are historical as well as those that engage contemporary situations, texts, performances, representations, and movements. We invite essays that break with academic conventions, as well as those that deploy those conventions creatively. We seek essays that rage, as well as those that offer ways to move our energies forward.

Contact Email
a.mazzaschi@northeastern.edu