Call for Papers
Signs Special Issue: "Gender and Cultural Memory"
SIGNS SPECIAL ISSUE: GENDER AND CULTURAL MEMORY EDS: VALERIE SMITH &
MARIANNE HIRSCH
SIGNS: JOURNAL OF WOMEN IN CULTURE AND SOCIETY seeks submissions for a
special issue on "Gender and Cultural Memory," slated for publication in
Autumn 2002. Although the reshaping of cultural memory and the inclusion
of women's works, stories, and artifacts have always been the driving
force of feminist scholarship, only in recent years have feminist scholars
been drawn to theoretical questions dealing with memory, trauma, and
transmission. Some of this work on autobiography and memoir; on
representations of way, exile, and diaspora; on sites of memory and
memorialization; and on the traumatic memory of sexual abuse has engaged
gender issues specifically. But other areas of cultural and collective
memory, perhaps especially the politics of nostalgia and the memory and
"postmemory" of the Holocaust, have been strangely resistant to feminist
analyses of gender and sexuality or to feminist engagements with ideas of
race, nation, and class. As the interdisciplinary work on trauma and
cultural memory becomes ever more sophisticated and as testimony acquires
the status of an important literary genre and legal source, a sustained
theoretical inquiry into the connections between memory and gender has
become more urgent.
For this issue, we seek manuscripts that examine different modes of memory
(personal, cultural, traumatic, "deep" and "ordinary," "embodied"), as
well as different theoretical models of memory, postmemory, and nostalgia,
through a number of specific examples that will lend themselves to gender
analysis. These examples may be literary, artistic, cinematic,
architectural, performative, ritualistic, or popular. They may reflect on
contestation, revision, forgetting, silence, and amnesia in the shaping of
memory and postmemory, as well as on the more practical issues of the
preservation of memory in archives, museums, monuments, and collections.
The editors particularly seek essays that provoke a more general
conceptual and theoretical understanding of gender and cultural memory.
The special issue editors are Valerie Smith (English and African-American
studies, UCLA) and Marianne G. Hirsch (French, Italian, Comparative
Literature, Dartmouth College). Please observe the guidelines in the
"Notice to Contributors" printed at the back of the most recent issues of
the journal; send submissions (five copies) no later than January 31, 2001
to:
SIGNS "Gender and Cultural Memory"
University of California, Los Angeles
1400H Public Policy Building
Box 957122 Los Angeles, CA 90095-7122
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