Pandemic, Protest, and Feminist Politics
NeMLA's 53rd Convention will be held in Baltimore, MD between March 10-13, 2022. More information here: http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla.html
This panel invites abstracts between 200-300 words that engage with questions and frameworks of dissent that have erupted in the recent socio-political movements led by women and female identifying subjects in the time of the pandemic, and consider the possibilities of forging radical plurinational and intersectional feminist solidarities. Please submit abstracts between June 15 to September 30 through this portal: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/19204
Detailed CFP below:
“Every woman has a well-stoked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, person and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in those assumptions underlining our lives.”
-Audre Lorde
“The Shaheen Bagh Protest May Have Ended, but Our Movement Lives On. #InquilabLivesOn” (From the official statement of the Shaheen Bagh collective posted on Twitter, March 24, 2020)
2020 was a year of mass movements, protests and strikes globally! Notwithstanding the forced isolations and mental and physical traumas wrought on people by the coronavirus, the pandemic also witnessed a progressive rise of collective action on a scale unprecedented in recent human history. The Black Lives Matter movement in the US, the Dalit Lives Matter and anti-CAA protests in India, the Aurat March in Pakistan, the anti-abortion law protests in Poland and the Ni Una Meños in Latin America leading up to the International Feminist Strike in Argentina are only some instances of the radical political waves that are resounding through the world. As reactions to increasing authoritarianism, fascism and biased legislations based on religion, ethnicity, race and gender, more and more grassroots level uprisings led by women and female identifying subjects are sprouting across the world. This panel invites papers that engage with questions and frameworks of dissent that have erupted in the recent socio-political movements and consider critically the implications/reverberations they have in our times. Women and female identifying subjects being at the forefront of protests in different parts of the world raises new questions for how we evaluate these uprisings from a transnational and plurinational feminist point of view. How can we correlate and create a dialogue between protests happening in multiple locations and temporalities with an aim to produce new idioms and fruitful imaginaries for radical, anti-neoliberal feminisms and feminist futures? Further, how does the participation of gendered bodies impact the idea of protest as a spectacle?
In the interest of exploring the above questions, the panel invites papers on topics that pivot around (but are not limited to) the following areas:
· Feminism and street protest
· Feminism and transnational dialogues
· Feminism, protest and symbols
· Street protest and media
· Protest and technology
· Feminism and social media
· Street protest and Street art
· Street protest and music
· Street protest and literature
· Street protest and film
· Street protest and space
· Street protest and gendered bodies
· Social justice and feminist futures
· Street protest and feminist temporality
. Street protest and food
· Pandemic and the protesting body
· Protest and the spectacle
· Protest and sound
. Protest and identity
. Protest and academic institutions