CFP: The Lady Doth Protest... Mapping Feminist Movements, Moments and Mobilisations

Biennial FWSA Conference, 21-23 June, 2013
University of Nottingham

Keynote Speakers

Professor Nadje Al-Ali (University of London)
Professor Diane Elson (University of Essex)
Dr Nirmal Puwar (Goldsmiths University)

This conference theme seeks to critically explore the concept of protest – its discourse, image and impact, and to examine the possibility of creative feminist engagement across a spectrum of moments, movements and mobilisations. Women have always participated in and led a wide variety of protests, feminist and otherwise. Their historical participation in movements for equal rights and civil liberties has routinely thrown up questions about feminist knowledge and political praxes. However, the visibility of women in a range of contemporary protests on a global scale - the ‘Arab spring’, the North American ‘occupy’ movement and activist marches like the ‘Slut Walk’ and ‘Muff March’ phenomena - makes revisiting debates on women and protest apposite. At the same time, the ‘war on terror’, the so-called death of multiculturalism in Europe, and women’s global participation in fundamentalist mobilisations and armed struggle raises new questions concerning the interstices between race, religion, class, sexuality and citizenship.

We conceive of the term ‘protest’ in its widest sense existing in a variety of practices including activism, critical pedagogies, literature, film, technologies, art and aesthetics – all of which coalesce around the challenge they mount to multiple hegemonies. By unpacking the concept of protest and expanding existing notions of the political through a feminist lens, we seek to understand how feminist protest, in particular, responds to and emerges in spite of, the challenges of our contemporary world. We invite papers from across the arts, humanities and social sciences. Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:

• Women and protest: theoretical, historical, and contemporaneous concerns;
• Sexual and gendered economies of neo-liberalism, recession, and austerity;
• Gender, securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism(s);
• New forms of trans-national activism and feminist politics;
• Critical feminist pedagogy in times of continuity and change;
• Protest literature, music, film, and art;
• The language/rhetoric of feminist movements and mobility;
• Non or anti-feminist protest and politics.

To submit:
Please send 250 word abstracts for twenty minute papers by 30 October 2012 or 600 word panel proposals by 30 September 2012 to the conference organisers : Claire O’Callaghan, Trishima Mitra-Kahn and Srila Roy 

To visit the conference website, please click here.