Subject: [Gender] CfP: Cooptation of gender equality discourses (Atgender Conference, Barcelona)

Dear colleagues,

We, Sara de Jong and Susanne Kimm (both University of Vienna), would like
to organise a panel at the 4th ATGENDER spring conference (Barcelona, June
25-27) on the "Cooptation of gender equality discourses" and, if the
quality of the papers and interest of people allow, develop a special
issue proposal on this topic. Please find our Call for Abstracts below and
attached.

Best wishes,
Susanne Kimm and Sara de Jong

Call for abstracts for panel proposal to 4th ATGENDER Spring Conference:
“Setting a New Agenda for the Equality Policies”

25-27 June 2014, Barcelona, Spain

 ATGENDER call for contributions:
http://www.atgender.eu/index.php/news/atgendernews/277-call-for%20-papers-conference-june-2014

Panel Proposal: Cooptation of gender equality discourses

On the 14th of October of last year, Nancy Fraser published a comment in
newspaper The Guardian entitled “How feminism became capitalism's
handmaiden – and how to reclaim it.” In this comment, Fraser builds on
arguments from her 2009 New Left Review article “Feminism, capitalism and
the cunning of history” in which she wrote about the “selective
enlistment” of feminist arguments which chime well with neoliberal
capitalism.

Taking Fraser’s intervention as our point of departure, we would like to
address the question of cooptation of feminist/queer concepts and bring
together paper contributions that discuss the appropriation, dilution, and
reinterpretation of key feminist and gender discourses and practices, such
as ‘empowerment’ and ‘gender equality.’ So far, disparate debates about
the ways in which academic and activist feminist discourses have been
adopted by political movements, campaigns, and institutions have taken
place in both feminist theory and applied research. For example, Elisabeth
Prügl (2011) and Audrey Reeves (2012) have discussed the incorporation of
feminist knowledge, particularly gender mainstreaming, into respectively
organizations and security institutions under the heading of
“governmentality.” Earlier discussions in the 1990s focused on state
feminism (e.g., in the edited volume by McBride Stetson/Mazur 1995) and
the role of femocrats (e.g., Eisenstein 1991, Gouws 1996). Queer
perspectives have also critically engaged with the institutionalization of
LGBTQ rights, coining the concept of “homonationalism” (Puar 2007).
Researchers in areas such as human trafficking or development have
scrutinized discourses on rescuing victims and their racialized and sexual
underpinnings (e.g., Andrijasevic 2007, Dogra 2011). At the same time,
they have watched the emergence of political alliances and pointed to
“strange bedfellows,” such as the Christian right and feminist groups
(e.g., Bernstein 2010).

The goal of the panel is twofold: first, to stimulate a dialog between the
different above-mentioned strands in order to identify mechanisms of
adoption as well as strategies to resist cooptation; second, to ask what
can be detected when different theoretical lenses (concepts) are applied
to analyze processes of what we here call “cooptation.” We are interested
in the ways in which emancipatory discourses, such as equality, and
practices are resignified, instrumentalized, and diluted and thus lose
their radical potential, and to what extent feminists are complicit in
this process. This means to also take into account the ways in which
feminist concepts are open to these kinds of connections. We want to trace
the development of relevant feminist/queer concepts in relation to the
risk of cooptation as well as strategies for reclaiming them.

Please submit an abstract of up to 250 words for your presentation and
include a short biography.

Submit your proposal to [log in to unmask] and
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Deadline: Friday March 7th, 2014.

(The deadline to submit the panel proposal to ATGENDER is March17th. We
will notify you about the acceptance of your abstract to the panel before
that date. Acceptance letters to the conference will be sent out
mid-April.)

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