Call for Proposals
“What is intersectional about intersectionality now?”
Special Issue
Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice
Editors: Corinne L. Mason and Amanda D. Watson
DEADLINE: June 30, 2014
Following the coining of the term “intersectionality” in Kimberle Crenshaw’s (1989) essay, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” feminist theory, methodologies, practices, pedagogies, and activisms have aimed to be intersectional. In fact, intersectionality is now understood as the most important theoretical intervention into feminist studies, and its mainstreaming marks a major paradigm shift in feminist praxis (McCall 2005; Nash, 2008). For example, the phrase, “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit” is now a ubiquitous phrase in the feminist blogosphere (Flavia Dzodan, 2011). Its popularization within the field has lead to increasingly sophisticated analyses of power, and yet, the mainstreaming of intersectionality has also lead to the hollowing-out and depoliticization of the concept. In this edited collection, we aim to collect timely essays that map out the intellectual and political terrain for intersectionality scholarship and practice in the context of ever shifting, changing, transforming, and mutating systems of domination, crisis, control, terror, and boundaries. We are particularly interested in the failures of intersectional ttheorizing to plot the constitutive functioning of the political, economic, and social at this historical moment. Following Jasbir Puar’s (2007) critical analysis of intersectionality, we will solicit essays that take seriously the institutionalization of intersectionality, and what is lost, gained, and made im/possible in these sites of feminist praxis.
We are particularly interested in the following topics and themes:
- Intersectionality and pedagogy/intersectionality in the classroom/intersectionality in the academy
- Feminist activism and intersectional critiques
- Intersectional failures, post-human, and new technologies
- Assemblages, affect, and intersectionality
- Identity politics, politics of naming, and dis-identification
- Transnational feminism and global intersectionality
- Institutionalization of intersectionality (government, women’s organizations, shelters, research hubs)
- Queer/ing intersections
- Indigenous feminisms and intersectionality
- Intersectionality, blogging, Third/Fourth Wave Feminisms
Please email a 250-word abstract and 150-word bio note to atlantisintersectionality@gmail.com by 30 JUNE, 2014.
