 |
 |
CFP: Digital Feminist Activisms: The Performances and Practices of Online Public Assemblies
Due: May 30, 2019
Editors: Dr. Shana MacDonald (University of Waterloo), Dr. Milena Radzikowska (Mount Royal University), Dr. Michelle MacArthur (University of Windsor), Brianna I. Wiens (York University)
With the rise of what Jessalyn Keller and Maureen Ryan have called “emergent feminism,” we are witnessing a moment marked by the “sudden reappearance” of strident critiques of gendered inequalities
within popular discourse (2018, 2). More often than not, emergent feminisms are amplified online through social media by popular feminism and celebrity endorsements (Banet-Weiser 2018, McRobbie 2009), which can problematically promote neoliberal values of
individual consumer practices and competitive self-improvement as a forms of empowerment. And yet, access to social media has produced important and critical forms of feminist politics. In Notes Towards a Theory
of Performative Assembly, Judith Butler (2015) advances the importance of bodies assembling in space as a form of protest that performatively asserts both “the right to appear” and demands “a livable life” for
those in positions of precarity. While feminist visibility in the broader public eye has produced important dialogues, this politics of assembly simultaneously begs the question: “What about those who prefer not to appear, who engage in their democratic activism
in another way?” (Butler 2015, 55). There are many valid and powerful reasons as to why feminist activists may not want or be able to appear given the dangerous climate of online spaces, rife with the violent
misogyny of trolling culture. These forms of publicness and erasure are equally important to consider within current considerations of emergent feminist practices online.
This book seeks to gather provocations, analyses, creative explorations, and/or cases studies of digital feminist practices from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives including, but not limited
to, media studies, communication studies, critical and cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, performance studies, digital humanities, feminist HCI, and feminist STS. The book frames digital feminisms as forms of public assembly that are performative
and theatrical; that is, performative in that they can offer, “a process, a praxis, an episteme, a mode of transmission, an accomplishment, and a means of intervening in the world” (Diana Taylor 2003, 15), and theatrical in that they are events that may include
characters, plot, the invocation of an audience, and the collective labour of multiple collaborators. In this way, digital feminist practices foster counterpublics––communities that enable “exchanges...distinct from authority” that “have a critical relation
to power” (Michael Warner 2002, 56). This book seeks to consider how digital feminist activism uses conventions of assembly, performativity, theatricality, and design to counter the individualizing forces of postfeminism and neoliberalism while foregrounding
the types of systemic change so greatly needed, but often overlooked, in this climate.
List of possible topics:
Please submit a 250-350 word abstract, a brief author bio, and any questions to Brianna I. Wiens ([log in to unmask])
by May 30th, 2019. Accepted submissions should be 6000-7000 words and will be due to the editors by November 1, 2019.
References
Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2018. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Duke University Press.
Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes Toward a Theory of Performative Assembly. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press.
Keller, Jessalynn and Maureen E. Ryan (eds). 2018. Emergent Feminisms: Complicating a Postfeminist Media Culture. Routledge.
McRobbie, Angela. 2008. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. Sage.
Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Warner, Michael. 2002. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14(1): 49-90.
--
Shana MacDonald PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Arts
Associate Chair, Speech Communication and Digital Arts Communication
University of Waterloo
ML 234
519-888-4567 Ext 35157
@shanamacPS
As a settler scholar with Indigenous ancestry tied to the Qalipu Mi’kmaq of Western Newfoundland, I acknowledge that I live and work on the traditional territory of the Attawandaron
(Neutral), Anishnaabeg, and Haudenosaunee peoples. The University of Waterloo is situated on the Haldimand Tract, land promised to Six Nations, which includes six miles on each side of the Grand River.