Dear all,

With usual apologies for cross posting. Please find below a call for papers for a stream on 'Feminist Solidarity’ at GWO 2018. 

 

The deadline for submission of abstracts is 1st November. Please submit abstracts through the conference website where you can also find submission guidelines:

 

http://www.cvent.com/events/gender-work-organisation-conference-abstract-submission/event-summary-b0ba95627e51477987fa00f4e8a945c3.aspx

 

All the best,

Sheena

 

 

Gender, Work and Organization

10th Biennial International Interdisciplinary Conference

Sydney, 13-16 June 2018

 

GWO 2018 Call for Abstracts

Feminist Solidarity

 

 

Convenors:

Rebecca Lund, University of Tampere, Finland

Siri Øyslebø Sørensen, NTNU, Norway

Sheena Vachhani, University of Bristol, UK

Alison Pullen, Macquarie University, Australia

 

 

This stream asks: how can we organize for and with feminist solidarity?

 

Solidarity is a way of being that is embedded in feminist cultural traditions and movements that resist women’s socio-economic inequalities and patriarchal power. This solidarity unites women in, inter alia, a refusal to accept the ongoing prevalence of sexism; the exploitation of women’s labour, emotions and bodies; violence towards women; inequalities of work opportunities and entrenched gender pay disparities. Solidarity is a form of organizing, which envisages a shared responsibility for the lives of others, working with care and intimacy, and discovering the social transformations that are possible through ‘democratic engagement’ (Segal, 2017: 228). Historically the role of solidarity in feminist activism and practice has been hotly contested yet never waning, with feminist scholars and activists noting the many cases where solidarity and resistance have brought women together despite their differences across race, sexuality, political and socio-economic positions (Segal, 2013).

 

Ironically, even though neoliberalism has seen an exacerbation of inequality between men and women in many spheres, it has also served to fragment feminist solidarity. McRobbie (2009) notes that neoliberalism individuates women’s empowerment and success as we are pushed to identify liberation with the achievement of self-interest. Emerging forms of feminism, such as neoliberal feminism, popular feminism, career or aspirational feminism (Rottenberg, 2017; Segal, 2017) question the extent to which solidarity amongst women is important. As Segal (2017: 233) notes, women are accepting ‘commercial women-friendly brandings of “empowerment” and choice’ which align with ‘media images of the alluringly feminine’. These ‘post-feminisms’ are a contested terrain which some claim to maintain masculine hegemony (McRobbie, 2009). This is what Power in Frazer’s Lean Out (2016) critically labels ‘oblivious feminism’.

 

What we also know is that corporations are largely involved in the appropriation of ‘acceptable’ kinds of feminism; using them for their branding purposes and, in the process, contributing to the creation of neoliberal subjects amenable to the pursuit of corporate interests (Rottenberg, 2017). In this contemporary context, we then ask how can such a corporate and neoliberal attack on feminist solidarity be resisted? Further, how can feminists refocus attention to issues non-corporate-friendly-issues such as violence towards women, reproductive rights, and denial of welfare, healthcare, housing, childcare, and education to women? At stake he is the increasing divide between employed/unemployed women on grounds of income, class, race and power.

 

In this stream we invite discussions that reflect on historical movements that relied on solidarity, critically appraise the role of solidarity in contemporary struggles and movements, and also set new agendas for what forms of thinking and action can change women’s position in society. We may well ask how we can work and organize for solidarity and action. Nevertheless this simple question overlooks the inherent practical, theoretical and philosophical challenges that circulate around discussions of feminist solidarity; challenges that need to be faced head-on.

 

hooks makes the point that:

 

[t]he idea of “common oppression” was a false and corrupt platform disguising and mystifying the true nature of women's varied and complex social reality. Women are divided by sexist attitudes, racism, class privilege, and a host of other prejudices. Sustained woman bonding can occur only when these divisions are confronted and the necessary steps are taken to eliminate them. Divisions will not be eliminated by wishful thinking or romantic reverie about common oppression despite the value of highlighting experiences all women share (hooks, 1986:127).

 

As hooks (1994: 67) has also explained in Outlaw Culture, a feminist solidarity based on progressive politics ‘must include a space for rigorous critique, for dissent, or we are doomed to reproduce in progressive communities the very forms of domination we seek to oppose’. As part of this, the problematization of identity politics as a source of feminist politics, the decentering of the subject (through queer theory, for example) and the politics of experiences (Phipps, 2016) have been at the forefront of questioning what feminist, political and affective solidarity mean in contemporary feminism in the context of increasing individualization, privatization and corporatization of public life (Mohanty, 2003).

 

Hemmings (2012: 150) raises the issue of affective solidarity and ‘[h]ow we move from affective dissonance to affective solidarity […] particularly in terms of how we might move from individual experience to collective feminist capacity’. For Hemmings, it is the ‘question of affect – misery, rage, passion, pleasure – that gives feminism its life’ (ibid.). The concept of affective solidarity becomes important to build unity through a sense of embodied feminist sociality (McRobbie, 2009) that exists in the spaces between personal and public spheres. ‘This highlights the importance of feeling for others as a way of transforming ourselves and the world, and thus renders affect as a way of moving across ontology and epistemology’ (Hemmings, 2012:148). How individual and diverging experiences become the point of entry for collective action is a process of developing a women’s solidarity that ‘draws on a broader range of affects – rage, frustration and the desire for connection – as necessary for a sustainable feminist politics of transformation, but that does not root these in identity or other group characteristics. Instead, affective solidarity is proposed as a way of focusing on modes of engagement that start from the affective dissonance that feminist politics necessarily begins from’ (Hemmings, 2012:148).

 

Neoliberal individualism, competitiveness, accountancy logics, publish or perish values, and management by numbers have increasingly come to define work environments. As well, the ideal worker and its self-interested values, and have become taken-for-granted and perceived as inevitable. This tendency is exacerbated as mainstream, neoliberal feminist agendas, such as Lean In, which reduce feminism to the discourse of ‘fixing women’ and the right to participate in the equality agenda. Absent is a challenge to hegemonic, white, masculinist values and the workplaces that inevitably reproduce these ideals. Broad neoliberal agendas of flexible capitalism, the dissolution of the welfare state, and increasing wealth inequality under a discourse of economic competitiveness have disproportionately affected women (Eisenstein, 2009; Fraser, 2013). Furthermore, it has been suggested that feminist activism has been disciplined, institutionalized and intellectualized such that it no longer offers the necessary radical response to ongoing issues of injustice (Walby, 2011). The intellectualization of feminism has also had alienating effects (Messer-Davidow, 2002).

 

For all the gloomy analysis and sad facts, there are voices and practices of resistance which raise the issue of what forms and means of achieving feminist solidarity might take. Indeed, while feminist solidarity has been put under much pressure in academia and other organizations over the last two decades, it has not been annulled. In this light, this track invites contributors that reflect on how we might successfully practice feminist solidarity and subvert existing hegemonic and symbolic orders. These reflections may be methodological, theoretical, conceptual and/or empirical in nature. Some questions and possibilities that you may wish to engagement with (but are not exhaustive) are:

 

· What constitutes feminist solidarity in lived experience? How might we explore feminist solidarity in its many forms and across different approaches to foster its political (and ethical) potential?

· What are the problems, dilemmas and paradoxes of its solidarity’s practice?

· What feminist alliances and social movements resist women’s oppression? What forms of organizing work and what can we learn from?

· Can the corporations, neoliberalism’s dependent children, be challenged?

· Have women become tamed (Fraser, 2009) in our fight for equality?

· What is feminisms’ relevance in the resistance against dominant forms of organizing which marginalizes women?

· What is feminist solidarity’s role in the battle against low-paid, insecure work?

· What is behind the corporate façade of supporting women’s initiatives, and the tensions between community support from the corporates and the ways in which these organisations fail to address their own violence toward women?

· How can organizations tackle social problems facing women such as domestic violence, homelessness etc.?

· What forms of feminist resistance are necessary given capitalist conditions and neoliberal regimes? How can we build on our differences to build solidarity and community?

· What post-capitalist futures are possible (Gibson-Graham, 1997; Frederici, 2012)?

· How might we produce knowledge differently through modes of solidarity and/or feminist sociality in ways that do not reproduce individualized, careerist ideals within our own discipline(s)?

· What methodological perspectives in gender and organization studies may be used to develop new feminist epistemologies of knowledge that challenge notions of ‘giving voice’?

 

For stream enquiries please contact Rebecca Lund on [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]

 

Papers from the stream will be selected for a special issue proposal of the Gender, Work and Organization journal.

 

 

References

Eisenstein, H. (2009) Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites use women’s labor and ideas to exploit the world. New York: Routledge.

 

Fraser, D. (2016) Lean Out. London: Watkins Media Limited.

 

Fraser, N. (2013) Fortunes of feminism – From state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis. London: Verso.

 

Federici, S. (2012) Revolution at point zero: Housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle. PM Press: Oakland, CA.

 

Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1997) The end of capitalism (as we knew it): A feminist critique of political economy. Capital & Class, 21(2):186-188.

 

Hemmings, C. (2012) ‘Affective solidarity: Feminist reflexivity and political transformation’, Feminist Theory, 13(2): 147–161.

 

hooks, b. (1986) ‘Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women’, Feminist Review, 23 (Summer): 125-138.

 

hooks, b. (1994) Outlaw Culture. London: Routledge.

 

McRobbie, A (2009) The Aftermath of Feminism – Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage.

 

Messer-Davidow, E. (2002) Disciplining Feminism: From Social Activism to Academic Discourse. Durham: Duke University Press.

 

Mohanty, C.T. (2003) ‘“Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles’, Signs, 28(2): 499-535.

 

Phipps, A. (2016) ‘Whose personal is more political? Experience in contemporary feminist politics’, Feminist Theory, 17(3): 303–321.

 

Rottenberg, C. 2017. “Neoliberal Feminism and the Future of Human Capital.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42 (2): 329–348

 

Segal, L. 2013. “Today, Yesterday & Tomorrow: Between Rebellion and Coalition Building.” In Rowbotham, S. Segal, L and Lynne Segal, and Wainwright, H (eds.) Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism. London: Merlin.

 

Segal, L. (2017) Gender, power and feminist resistance, in Bolsø, A., Svendsen Bang, S.H. and Sørenson Øyslebø, S. (eds.) Bodies, Symbols and Organizational Practice. London: Routledge.

 

Walby, S (2011) The Future of Feminism. Cambridge: Polity Press.