CALL FOR PAPERS

AAG 2018

NEW ORLEANS, APRIL 10-14, 2018

 POLITICAL GEOGRAPHIES OF DISCOMFORT FEMINISM AND UNCOMFORTABLE INTIMACY

Building on the Second Feminist Geography Conference held in May 2017 at UNC-Chapel Hill, this CFP invites papers that explore “Political Geographies of Discomfort Feminism and Uncomfortable Intimacy.” In feminist political geography intimacy has emerged as a key analytic for the exploration of states, borders and political ideologies through analysis of bodies, dress, quotidian encounters, emotions and intimate relations of love, marriage and babies (e.g., among others, Faier 2009; Gökarıksel 2012; Sharpe 2009; Pain and Staeheli 2014; Smith 2012; Pratt and Rosner 2012; Mountz and Hyndman 2006). More recent writings on feminism draw attention of the need to also consider uncomfortable intimacies and a feminism based on a politics of discomfort. For example, Sara Ahmed explores the willful ignorance necessary to maintain public comfort, emphasizing the eyerolls, silences, and ostracization directed at the “feminist killjoy” who calls out racism and sexism in everyday situations (Ahmed 2010). In a similar sense, Kumi Silva asks who is comforted by the Women’s March on Washington and A Day without a Woman, questioning how such events enable a smug “comfort feminism,” which flattens difference and escapes a critical assessment of culpability and complicity (Gökarıksel and Smith 2017; Manigault-Bryant 2017; Silva 2017), Along another register, in considering intimacy as a political site we must also grapple with the violence of intimacy, whether that is the slippage between war and home (Pain 2015) or intimacy as the site of anti-Black violence (Sharpe 2009; Weheliye 2014; Vasudevan 2017).  

            This attention to discomfort feminism and uncomfortable intimacy relates to intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989, 1991), which has entered into mainstream spaces and conversations far too late and in a manner that sometimes evacuates its political potential. We wonder, how like the superficiality of the language of diversity (Ahmed 2012), the mere invocation of intersectionality “largely substitutes for intersectional analysis itself” (Puar 2012). A deep engagement with discomfort and uncomfortable intimacy might provide a starting point to go beyond a superficial acknowledgement of difference. To this end, we encourage papers interested in exploring the potential political possibilities offered by discomfort and intentional engagement with racialized, classed, and heteronormative inequalities and privileges ignored or flattened by this comfort feminism. We see such explorations important for addressing the contemporary resurgence of right wing nationalism and populism, which attempts to oppress women, people of color, LGBTQ, and religious minorities, and mainstream feminist resistance that sometimes too easily folds difference into nationalist and capitalist narratives through its signs and slogans and continues to uphold whiteness, middle class privilege, and heterosexuality as the norm. While we encourage papers that respond to the contemporary turn to the right, we also invite papers that broadly examine the political geographies of discomfort and uncomfortable intimacies in a variety of settings and time periods.

Potential papers might explore:

·       The emergence of spaces and practices of uncomfortable intimacies and discomfort feminism in empirical research and its theorization in such contexts.

·       The disruptive potential of uncomfortable intimacies and discomfort feminism to intervene in campus life, department politics or teaching curriculum.

·       Questions of how a feminism of uncomfortable intimacies might reconstitute the political potential of intimacy and work to map out new spaces of political action?

·       The rise of popular, corporate or comfort feminisms and the consequences of their “superficial” engagements with intersectionality.

Please send a title and abstract (250 words maximum) to Banu Gökarıksel  ([log in to unmask]), Mike Hawkins ([log in to unmask]), Chris Neubert ([log in to unmask]), and Sara Smith ([log in to unmask]) by October 7. We will respond to all submissions by October 14.

Works Cited:

Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press.

———. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press.

Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1: 139–67.

———. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, 1241–99.

Faier, Lieba. 2009. Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan. Univ of California Press.

Gökarıksel, Banu. 2012. “The Intimate Politics of Secularism and the Headscarf: The Mall, the Neighborhood, and the Public Square in Istanbul.” Gender, Place & Culture 19 (1): 1–20.

Gökarıksel, Banu, and Sara Smith. 2017. “Intersectional Feminism beyond U.S. Flag Hijab and Pussy Hats in Trump’s America.” Gender, Place & Culture 0 (0): 1–17. doi:10.1080/0966369X.2017.1343284.

Manigault-Bryant, LeRhonda. 2017. “An Open Letter To White Liberal Feminists After Donald Trump’s Election.” Bust. http://bust.com/feminism/18703-letter-white-feminists.html.

Mountz, Alison, and Jennifer Hyndman. 2006. “Feminist Approaches to the Global Intimate.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 34 (1/2): 446–63.

Pain, Rachel. 2015. “Intimate War.” Political Geography 44: 64–73.

Pain, Rachel, and Lynn Staeheli. 2014. “Introduction: Intimacy‐geopolitics and Violence.” Area 46 (4): 344–47.

Pratt, Geraldine, and Victoria Rosner. 2012. The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time. New York: Columbia University Press.

Puar, Jasbir K. 2012. “‘ I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory.” PhiloSOPHIA 2 (1): 49–66.

Sharpe, Christina. 2009. Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Silva, Kumi. 2017. “Panel Remarks.” presented at the Feminist Geography 2017, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, May 19.

Smith, Sara. 2012. “Intimate Geopolitics: Religion, Marriage, and Reproductive Bodies in Leh, Ladakh.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102 (6): 1511–28. doi:10.1080/00045608.2012.660391.

Vasudevan, Pavithra. 2017. “The Domestic Geopolitics of Racial Capitalism.” University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, May 19.

Weheliye, AG. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.