**PLEASE NOTE THAT THE EVENT IS NOW FULL**
SCHEDULE
All sessions are in the ARTS TWO building and will either be in rooms 217, 316 or 320. Please refer to the site map for the Mile End campus posted on the Tumblr.
9.30- 10:00 Registration, coffee (Arts 2, 316)
10.00 - 11.00 Keynote (Arts 2, 320): Alison Phipps, ‘Identity, experience, choice and responsibility: feminism in a neoliberal and neoconservative age’
11.05 - 12.30 Parallel sessions 1.
THEORY AND PRAXIS 1 (Arts 2, 320)
Chair: Natalie Edwards
Dolores María Lussich, 'Tensions and bridges: between Queer Theory and fourth wave feminism’
Annette-Carina van der Zaag, 'Thought beyond the Binaries’
Julian Vigo, 'Fourth Wave Feminism and Neo-Liberal Politics: The No-Platforming of Difference and Commodification of Gender’
FEMINISM IN IRELAND (Arts 2, 316)
Chair: Gill Ni Cheallaigh
Maria Deiana and Claire Pierson, 'Fourth wave feminism in Northern Ireland: feminist activism in a society transitioning from violent conflict’
Fiona Reidy, 'More than a Mother - Reproducing HERstory: a feminist analysis of the discourse and power structures of abortion and women’s rights
Izzy Fox, 'Ireland’s Facebook Feminists: Intersectional or White Noise?’
IN THE NEWS AND ON THE STREETS (Arts 2, 217)
Chair: Rumana Hashem
Samantha Joeck, 'Stop Street Harassment: Universality and Solidarity as Tools for International Diffusion’
Emily Turner, 'How does the reporting of rape cases demonstrate rape culture? A study focusing on news coverage of the Steubenville Rape’
Heather McKnight, 'Reclaiming the Night: Fatal intersections in Concrete Spaces’
12.30 -1.15 Lunch (Arts 2, 316/320)
1.15 -2.40 Parallel sessions 2.
THEORY AND PRAXIS 2 (Arts 2, 320)
Chair: Nozomi Uematsu
Sarah Hickmott, 'Not enough theory or too much? Towards the praxis of intersectional feminism’
Gill Ni Cheallaigh, 'But I really think about my feminism!: Paperback feminism and the academy’
Helen Goodwyn and Emily Jane Hogg, 'Room for Confidence: Early Career Feminists in the English Department’
FEMINISM ONLINE 1 (Arts 2, 316)
Chair: Karen Lumsden
Matthew Harper, 'The fourth wave and the intersection between feminism and technology’
Emilie Lawrence, 'Riding the Fourth Wave and Challenging Misogyny; Funnymism, Digital Sisterhood and Taking the Online Offline’
FEMINISM ON STAGE (Arts 2, 217)
Chair: Heather Morgan
Caoimhe Mader McGuiness, 'Feminist Fringes’
Gemma Commane and Liselle Terret, 'Feminism and the Arts/Popular Culture: Going for Gold: Flushed!’
2.40-3.00 Tea (Arts 2, 316)
3.00 - 4.00 Parallel sessions 3
TURNS AND RETURNS: NEW DEPARTURES IN FEMINIST THOUGHT (Arts 2, 320)
Chair: Annette van der Zaag
Cristina Morar, 'Brain and beauty: Renewed engagements with feminist thought through the body’
Natasha Lee, 'Materialist Feminism Today’
FEMINISM IN NATIONAL CONTEXTS: ITALY AND JAPAN (Arts 2, 316)
Andrea Hajek, ’“We were born after but by no means do we feel post” Re-defining feminist identities in contemporary Italy’.
Nozomi Uematsu, 'A Twisted “Liberation” of Feminism?: A rhetorical analysisof contemporary Japan’s governmental campaign A Country in which Women Shine
FILM AND FASHION (Arts 2, 217)
Sage Townsend, 'Fashionable Feminism’
Francesca Hardy, 'The unkempt bush: A burning question’
4.00-5.00 Parallel sessions 4
INTERSECTIONALITY (Arts 2, 320)
Chair: Sarah Hickmott
Rumana Hashem, 'I am not a feminist, I believe in my freedom’: Concerns to the limits of feminism in the 'fourth wave’
Tamsin Hinton-Smith, 'Feminism, intersectionality and speaking nearby’
FEMINISM ONLINE 2 (Arts 2, 316)
Chair: Matthew Harper
Tangwen Roberts, 'Uniting Online: The ripplings of a fourth wave of feminism’
Karen Lumsden and Heather Morgan, 'Back to the (feminist) future?: deconstructing (gendered) online abuse’
THE POLITICS OF CHOOSING (Arts 2, 217)
Chair: Gemma Commane
Kinneret Lahad, 'Fourth Wave Feminism and the Politics of Choosing Female Singlehood’
Natalie Edwards, 'Fourth Wave Feminism and the Rejection of Motherhood’
5.00 - 5.45 Wine reception (Arts 2, 316)
SCHEDULE
All sessions are in the ARTS TWO building and will either be in rooms 217, 316 or 320. Please refer to the site map for the Mile End campus posted below.
9.30- 10:00 Registration, Coffee (Arts 2, 316)
10.00 - 11.00 Keynote (Arts 2, 320): Alison Phipps, Identity, experience, choice and responsibility: feminism in a neoliberal and neoconservative age
11.05 - 12.30 Parallel sessions 1.
Theory and Praxis 1 (Arts 2, 320)
Chair: Natalie Edwards
Julian Vigo, ‘Fourth Wave Feminism and Neo-Liberal Politics: The No-Platforming of Difference and Commodification of Gender’
Annette-Carina van der Zaag, 'Thought beyond the Binaries’
Dolores María Lussich, 'Tensions and bridges: between Queer Theory and fourth wave feminism’
Feminism in Ireland (Arts 2, 316)
Chair: Gill Ni Cheallaigh
Maria Deiana and Claire Pierson, 'Fourth wave feminism in Northern Ireland: feminist activism in a society transitioning from violent conflict’
Fiona Reidy, 'More than a Mother - Reproducing HERstory: a feminist analysis of the discourse and power structures of abortion and women’s rights
Izzy Fox, 'Ireland’s Facebook Feminists: Intersectional or White Noise?’
In the news and in the streets (Arts 2, 217)
Chair: Rumana Hashem
Samantha Joeck, 'Stop Street Harassment: Universality and Solidarity as Tools for International Diffusion’
Emily Turner, 'How does the reporting of rape cases demonstrate rape culture? A study focusing on news coverage of the Steubenville Rape’
Heather McKnight, 'Reclaiming the Night: Fatal intersections in Concrete Spaces’
12.30 -1.15 Lunch (Arts 2, 316/320)
1.15 -2.40 Parallel sessions 2.
Theory and Praxis 2 (Arts 2, 320)
Chair: Nozomi Uematsu
Sarah Hickmott, 'Not enough theory or too much? Towards the praxis of intersectional feminism’
Gill Ni Cheallaigh, 'But I really think about my feminism!: Paperback feminism
Helen Goodwyn and Emily Jane Hogg, 'Room for Confidence: Early Career Feminists in the English Department’
Feminism online 1 (Arts 2, 316)
Chair: Karen Lumsden
Matthew Harper, 'The fourth wave and the intersection between feminism and technology’
Emilie Lawrence, 'Riding the Fourth Wave and Challenging Misogyny; Funnymism, Digital Sisterhood and Taking the Online Offline’
Feminism on stage (Arts 2, 217)
Chair: Heather Morgan
Caoimhe Mader McGuiness, 'Feminist Fringes’
Gemma Commane and Liselle Terret, 'Feminism and the Arts/Popular Culture: Going for Gold: Flushed!’
2.40-3.00 Tea (Arts 2, 316)
3.00 - 4.00 Parallel sessions 3
Turns and returns: new departures in feminist thought (Arts 2, 320)
Chair: Annette van der Zaag
Cristina Morar, 'Brain and beauty: Renewed engagements with feminist thought through the body’
Natasha Lee, 'Materialist Feminism Today’
Feminism in national contexts: Italy and Japan (Arts 2, 316)
Chair: Maria Deiana
Andrea Hajek, ’“We were born after but by no means do we feel post” Re-defining feminist identities in contemporary Italy’.
Nozomi Uematsu, 'A Twisted “Liberation” of Feminism?: A rhetorical analysis of contemporary Japan’s governmental campaign, A Country in which Women Shine’
Film and Fashion (Arts 2, 217)
Chair: Liselle Terret
Sage Townsend, 'Fashionable Feminism’
Francesca Hardy, 'The unkempt bush: A burning question’
4.00-5.00 Parallel sessions 4
Intersectionality (Arts 2, 320)
Chair: Sarah Hickmott
Rumana Hashem, 'I am not a feminist, I believe in my freedom’: Concerns to the limits of feminism in the 'fourth wave’
Tamsin Hinton-Smith, 'Feminism, intersectionality and speaking nearby’
Feminism online 2 (Arts 2, 316)
Chair: Matthew Harper
Tangwen Roberts, 'Uniting Online: The ripplings of a fourth wave of feminism’
Karen Lumsden and Heather Morgan, 'Back to the (feminist) future?:deconstructing (gendered) online abuse’
The politics of choosing (Arts 2, 217)
Chair: Gemma Commane
Kinneret Lahad, 'Fourth Wave Feminism and the Politics of Choosing Female Singlehood’
Natalie Edwards, 'Fourth Wave Feminism and the Rejection of Motherhood’
5.00 - 5.45 Wine reception (Arts 2, 316 / 320)
DIRECTIONS
Registration for the conference will be in Room 316 in the Arts Two building at the Mile End Campus of Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road London E1 4NS.
Take the Central, Hammersmith & City, District or Central Line to Mile End. When you exit the tube station turn left down Mile End Road, cross Eric Street and the A1025, continue under a big, yellow bridge. Continue a little further and you will see QMUL on your right.
Enter by the East Gate then turn left across the Arts Quarter (see map below.) Continue past the Nuevo cemetery on your right. The Arts Two building is on your left (building 35 on the map below.) Registration will be in room 316 on the third floor.
FEMINIST FUTURES: INTERROGATING THE FOURTH WAVE QMUL, 27th June 2015
ABSTRACTS
Commane, Gemma. Coventry University and Terret, Liselle. Coventry University. Going For Gold: Flushed!
Referring to it throughout as ‘him’, the toilet … debunks the glamorous object (champayne glass) of von Teese, but also explores the current social climate where women desperately grasp for a visual ideal and attempt to navigate feelings of powerlessness and abjection: … to reposition people’s ideas about bulimia … . (Terret in Nally, 2012: 128)
In the past decade the popularity of neo-burlesque has grown considerably and has been framed as a ‘political’ leisure time activity where women are seen to be afforded the opportunity to ‘reclaim’ their bodies from objectification, negative sexualization and gentleman clubs (Baldwin 2004; Glasscock 2003; Von Teese, 2006). Beyond the safe spaces of burlesque, cabaret and comedy clubs; the image of burlesque has been used within mainstream culture to sell alcohol and lingerie (e,g: Dita Von Teese and Cointreau and her Von Follies range at Debenhams), generic makeup styles (e.g. Von Teese, 2006), flights and holidays (e.g. Virgin Airways), and popular entertainment (e.g. Burlesque the film, Telephone by Lady Gaga, an Candyman by Christina Aguilera). We argue that the commodification of tease as fashionable, safe and a particular body look and ‘politic;’ is problematic because neo-burlesque has become a depoliticized movement. The replication of the ‘idealized’ shape and femininity in the rise and popularity of neo-tease adds to the depoliticized bodies of women who are seen as Other, specifically women who adapt performative repertoires beyond the ‘normative’ cutesy coquettish style. Through original ethnography and case studying Doris La Trine and her performance ‘Going For Gold: Flushed’ (an autobiographical performance that burlesques bulima); we explore the ways in which LipSiCk Queer Feminist Neo-Burlesque (QFNB) (Terret, 2014) intentionally interrogates the emotional and political potential of burlesque through reframing how the abject’ body is perceived by the viewer and how it is lived / felt / experienced by the performer. Doris La Trine’s LipSiCk QFNB is a DIY aesthetic that is subversive, subcultural, feminist, and queer. It burlesques oppressive and stereotyped perceptions of the Other, to provoke and subvert the gaze in order to reveal the masquerade (Butler, 1990) and in doing so hopes to implicate the audience. It places the Other centre stage where s/he authors her own parodic self-representation. It is about tease and parody, comical but cutting. The paper explores how the autobiographical method within LipSiCk Queer Feminist Neo-Burlesque enables a deeper commitment to emancipating, locating, politicizing, (re)activating one agency. The paper therefore highlights the political potentiality of LipSiCk QFNB in motivating and making visible particular voices that are silent, specifically Othered bodies.
Deiana, Maria. Queen’s University Belfast and Pierson, Claire. University of Ulster. Fourth wave feminism in Northern Ireland: feminist activism in a society transitioning from violent conflict
Northern Ireland has in the past five years, in tandem with a global movement, witnessed an upsurge in feminist awareness and activism. However, unlike other western liberal democracies, it has been undergoing a process of transition since the signing of the Good Friday / Belfast Agreement in 1998. Mainstream processes of peace-building, although largely ending violent conflict, have marginalised gender equality and often ignored wider forms of structural violence and the militarisation of male identity which impacts heavily on women’s lives and experiences.
Consequently, younger women approaching feminism in this era have similar issues to their peers in the wider European/American context, whilst in addition suffering the legacies of 30 years of low-level conflict. Feminist activism in the region has historically been divided through tensions of ethno-national identity and as a result, feminist activism, whilst being cognisant of the inequalities which affect women in multiple contexts must also be context specific with regard to conflict related gender inequality.
This paper will reflect on the current wave of feminist activism in Northern Ireland and in particular on the motivations of those younger women who engage with feminism to critically reflect on the impact of conflict and ethno-national identity on political engagement in the ‘fourth wave’. The authors of the paper are both active in feminist movements within Northern Ireland and have also engaged in academic research in the arena of gender and peace-building. As a result, they will apply both academic theorising and personal experience to the paper.
Fox, Izzy. University College Dublin. Ireland’s Facebook Feminists: Intersectional or White Noise?
This paper provides a unique insight into how feminists in Ireland engage with similar tools, support similar campaigns, and employ similar tactics to their fourth wave UK counterparts, while also being embroiled in the fight for access to abortion, a decidedly second-wave cause. Applying Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) to the Irish Feminist Network’s (IFN) Facebook page, to interrogate the group’s position on, and engagement, with intersectional feminism, this paper argues for an intersectional feminist discourse praxis, a complication of the “feminist discourse praxis” articulated by Michelle M. Lazar, in order to engage in “analytical activism” (145). The paper focuses on a number of case studies dealing with the issues of race / cultural appropriation, abortion, and the group’s support for the controversial Turn off the Red Light Campaign (TOTRL) (which calls for an end to the “harm of prostitution,”) by critically analysing key conversation threads on the IFN’s Facebook page. Even though the IFN is not a self-declared intersectional group, intersectionality, manifesting in various ways, from trans issues, to race, and migrant women workers, among others, has become more prevalent on its Facebook threads in the last year. However, at times, in spite of being well-intentioned, the group has been complicit in perpetuating a particularly white and Irish iteration of feminism. The analytical activism employed here seeks to uncover how hegemonic ideologies in relation to gender and race, in particular, are enacted and resisted on the group’s Facebook threads.
Hajek, Andrea. University of Glasgow. “We were born after, but by no means do we feel post.” Re-defining feminist identities in contemporary Italy
We are historical feminists
We were born after
But by no means do we feel post
It is with this polemical message that a group of young Italian women shattered any illusions of a cross-generational revival of feminism during a nation-wide feminist event in 2013. It was the second – and currently last – edition of a new series of national, feminist gatherings that a group of second-wave feminists had re-launched a year earlier. The follow-up event in 2013 saw the more active involvement of younger generations of women, but also strong tensions both between different generations and within the same generations. What seemed to be at the heart of the debates were issues of feminist identity and ownership – who may claim to be an “historical” feminist as opposed to those who were “born after”? What about those generations who do not fall within the second, third or indeed fourth waves? How should we even understand the generational paradigm? In my paper I argue, in fact, that the concept of generation is a highly problematic one, as is the idea of feminist waves. This becomes particularly evident in the Italian case, where the history of first-wave feminists is largely unknown, and there seems to be a general conviction that feminism ‘started’ with the generation of the late 1960s – those commonly known as historical feminists, and who were to be contested during the 2013 conference. I therefore challenge the concepts of generation and generational waves as I discuss current debates about feminism and feminist identity in Italy.
Hardy, Francesca. University of Aberdeen. The Unkempt Bush: A Burning Question
Since its release much has been said about Abdellatif Kechiche’s Palme d’Or winning Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013). The sex scenes and the representation of its lead protagonist’s body have elicited especial attention in the press and doubtless amongst the film’s audiences. The fallout that occurred once the film had wrapped likely fuelled these conversations further, with the its actresses describing the shoot as ‘horrible’, ‘humiliating’ and bordering on prostitution. Many questions have thus circulated regarding whom these moments address and serve (the male gaze, Kechiche’s own fantasies) and whether they are pleasurable, painful or pornographic. A heady or offensive mix of all three might act as a temporary compromise but a notably titillating question also emerged following Blue’s initial outing: Is this sex “real”? The ‘pussy’ prostheses used by Seydoux and Exarchopoulos soon put paid to this debate/desire. More significant, however, than the presence of plastic between the bodies of the actresses is what was removed from them. Hair.
Hair is not just located on the tops of our heads, as the film’s title obliquely suggests, but it covers our entire bodies. A spectator of Blue is the Warmest Colour, however, encounters only the smooth, hairless surfaces of Seydoux and Exarchopoulos’s entangled bodies. How women are styled on-screen is thus edited right down to the epidermis and this is perhaps the only reality that Blue shows. Departing from Kechiche’s film, this paper will make some preliminary gestures towards exploring, historicising and theorising the representation and indeed the non-representation of women’s body hair in cinema in a series of contemporary film releases. How, for instance, might we read the proximity between depilation and punishment? How might we understand the contemporary turn towards thinking the surface as the fundamental site for community and contact with regards to the stripping of women’s outer superficies onscreen? And how might we reclaim and mobilise a hirsute feminine corporeality when the pubic and the pit are made public?
Hashem, Rumana. University of East London. ‘I am not a feminist, I believe in my freedom’: Concerns to the limits of feminism in the ‘fourth wave’
On the event of IWD 2015 on 8 March, organised by the Bengali community women’s organisation, called the Nari Diganta -women in movement for equal rights, social justice and secularism in Britain, it was argued that one does not necessarily need to be a feminist to address inequalities and issues in relation to oppression and social justice. The keynote-speaker and a young film-maker, self-identified as an anthropologist, declared that:’ I am not a feminist, I believe in freedom’ in a fashion to suggest that the notion that defines women’s movement against oppression and patriarchy as part of feminist movement is problematic. The argument that freedom can be achieved without engaging in feminist movements was popular in, and accepted by, the forum, and concerns to former feminist approaches were obvious among young women. This paper reflects on the discussion at the IWD 2015 at Nari Diganta, and related women’s rights activities that I am involved in. I seek to understand the concerns to former approaches and the debates of fourth wave feminism in relation to the struggles for equal rights and social justice by certain groups of women, especially at the grassroots level. As a community-activist and a feminist-sociologist, I adopt a ‘translocational-social field theory’ to analyse positionality of women in grassroots activism, and I define young creative women’s struggle as isolated and misguided fights for freedom which lacks an apt theory and which are dominated by media industries. I suggest to look into the discursive and intersectional spheres of oppression, and to grasp the nuanced distinction between northern and southern young women’s activism in relation to class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and religion. I propose that there is a possibility to recognise these struggles as ‘patriarchal smashers’. The suggestion to view the trends of women’s struggles in the fourth wave as a movement of ‘patriarchal smasher’ does not, however, dismiss the relevance and the necessity to recgonise former feminist approaches.
Hickmott, Sarah. University of Oxford. Not enough theory or too much? Towards the praxis of intersectional feminism
This paper reflects on the experience of founding and running a feminist campaign, ‘Armpits4August’, in order to consider the relation between theory and praxis in fourth wave feminism. ‘Armpits4August’ was launched in 2012 and ran for two years, raising over £10,000 – making it the main source of funding – for Verity, the national charity researching and supporting people with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). It had at its core two main objectives: firstly, to raise awareness of PCOS, a condition that is woefully under-funded and under-researched, despite affecting around 10% of bodies assigned female at birth. Secondly, and related to the fact that one of the common symptoms of PCOS is hirsutism, it aimed to ignite a discussion about female body hair by encouraging women grow their armpit hair for a month in August.
After two years, the campaign fell apart – as almost all feminist campaigns seem to – because of ‘political differences.’ Despite the very best efforts to be intersectional feminists in our approach (we were very aware, for example, that perceiving yourself as having the option of growing your underarm hair was itself linked to some forms of privilege, and rather than ignoring this tried to engage with that directly) we nonetheless ended up divided, hostile, and playing what felt like a game of feminist top trumps. Ultimately, what reflecting on this experience suggests is that these very necessary ‘theoretical’ approaches – intersectionality in particular, but I think it also applies to assemblage theory and other ways of decentering the white, middle class feminist subject – and above all the language associated with them, also make it absolutely inaccessible to those without a certain educational privilege. Instead, this (admittedly theoretical!) paper asks: what would the praxis of intersectional feminism look like?
Hinton-Smith, Tamsin. University of Sussex. Feminism, intersectionality, and speaking nearby.
This paper draws on a Marie Sklodowska Curie project focused on sharing of expertise and capacity-building, in addressing inequalities and exclusions within the opportunities of internationally mobile higher education. The project involves collaborative work between academic partners from the UK, Spain and Sweden, and the NGO Roma Education Fund in Budapest, Hungary. Narratives of Roma women around participating in HE opportunities convey the need for approaches that identify the significance of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991) and assemblage (Puar 2007), and for a politics of speaking nearby (Minh-Ha 2000).
Roma people are the most marginalized minority in Europe and the only one with no homeland. They are subjected to deeply entrenched discrimination, victimization, exclusion and poverty across European countries, through injustices including educational segregation, and systematic eviction and forced relocation. Roma women additionally experience gender based injustices including forced sterilization, and are also seen as bearing a perceived dual oppression of ethnic discrimination and a patriarchal culture (Vincze 2014). As such, Roma feminists including Alexandra Oprea have identified parallels with the experiences of minority women in the US, and have responded to criticisms of employing an intersectional approach that see this as privileging the oppression of Roma women over that of Roma men (2010).
As one Roma woman HE student expressed in the research, she felt acutely the cumulative experience of being Roma, a woman, Muslim, from the European country in which she grew up (which she identified as having a particularly patriarchal culture). Her rich narrative conveyed her embodied experience of intersectionality. Black feminism exposed the inequality of speaking for other women. Yet it is vital amongst the debates of contemporary feminism that we protect the space, will and language to articulate shared responses to ongoing inequalities in material and symbolic resources.
Joeck, Samantha. L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Stop Street Harassment: Universality and Solidarity as Tools for International Diffusion
The movement against street harassment, started in 2005 in the United States, has recently spread throughout the world to countries on every continent. This movement uses the internet as a platform for women to publicly share their experiences, which serves to demonstrate the ubiquity of the phenomenon while fostering solidarity among women from different backgrounds as victims of street harassment. The focus on universality has proved to be an effective strategy in terms of reaching an international audience and garnering positive media attention. However, its use of solidarity resembles the rhetoric of feminists in the 1970s that attempted to unite women by their shared experience of sexism. This discourse was later criticised for being centred around the experience of white, heterosexual, middle-to-upper-class women, thus ignoring the multiple discriminations experienced by women who did not fit this category. Whereas the reflexivity and critical thinking that are central to an academic environment invite radical critiques of social dynamics and allow for nuanced visions of hierarchy in society, the online-policing of today’s social media fosters caution and an unwillingness to move beyond catchy slogans that condense social problems to bite-sized, easily-digestible phrases that appeal to a wide audience. In line with this tendency has been the response of the movement against street harassment to critiques regarding its relationship to race and class. Instead of integrating an intersectional analysis to understand the root of the problem, the movement denies the relevance of these factors by claiming that street remarks are experienced by all women and can come from men of all social backgrounds. This paper seeks to investigate how the tendency of internet-based, international movements to gloss over challenging questions regarding intersectionality prevents effective political action in multiple social and cultural contexts.
Lee, Natasha. Princeton University. Materialist Feminism Today
My paper considers the legacy of French materialist feminism in recent theory and activist work, and draws from an international conference I organized on this topic, last fall at Princeton University. The conference stemmed from the observation that academics, policy-makers and activists throughout the world are increasingly turning to analyses of sex and gender that merge a theory of global social relations to a call for a collective practice. In this context, I argue, they return to materialist feminism as offering a privileged set of tools to address contemporary questions and challenges.
I begin by briefly retracing materialist feminism from its origins in France in the 1970s, to its broad dissemination across disciplines, through the work of Christine Delphy, Nicole-Claude Mathieu’s anthropological essays and Monique Wittig’s ground-breaking critique of heteronormativity. I show that the movement’s pioneering role in studying the categories of race and ethnicity, alongside that of sex, particularly in the pivotal work of Colette Guillaumin, have made it a useful framework to think through contemporary reassessments of intersectionality.
In a second section, I outline current work highlighted by the conference, and how it engages with, and transforms, the materialist feminist tradition. The event brought together scholars from around the world, including Jules Falquet and Elsa Galérand, who focus on immigration and gendered patterns of work, Stevi Jackson whose field-work is in Asia, Canadian sociologist Danielle Juteau, cultural theorist Bronwyn Winter, as well as expert of the Middle-east Minoo Moallem, and philosopher Cynthia Kraus from Switzerland, among others. I also consider other scholars who acknowledge a debt to this movement, from Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, to Gayatri Spivak. Ultimately, I argue that the movement’s reach, both in theory and activism, are underestimated and merit attention in both their foundational texts and renewed form.
Lahad, Kinneret. Tel-Aviv University, Israel. Fourth Wave Feminism and the Politics of Choosing Female Singlehood
Over the last few decades, a growing body of feminist scholarship has contended that the rhetoric of choice and the injunction for self-monitoring have become central to women’s self-understandings and life trajectories. It has been claimed that under the guise of free choice and self-empowerment, antiquated patriarchal arrangements are reinforced, and a fantasy world stripped of the need for collective structural change has been created (Ferguson, 2010). This is but one reason why the celebratory language of choice does not, in fact, provide alternatives, but rather creates new forms of limitations while fabricating a false sense of power (McRobbie, 2004).
One of the most problematic aspects of these narratives is that when certain acts are articulated as choices, they can then be easily construed as feminist acts, thus emptying feminism of its collective political content. My paper continues these analyses from a different angle, one which examines some of the customary and new discursive contexts that both enable and restrict the possibilities of choosing female singlehood today. More specifically, I seek to uncover some of the shifting discourses that define and fix female singlehood. In particular, I will focus on the various forms in which chosen singlehood denotes a non-reflexive and irresponsible subjectivity, but nonetheless enables single women to reclaim their agency.
The idea of chosen singlehood and the emergence of the happily single subject as a new normative type subverts hegemonic familial beliefs, particularly in a cultural climate that stigmatizes singlehood as a deviant social category. However, the critique I propose here is not merely aimed at deconstructing the discursive mechanism that delegitimizes singlehood; I also wish to point out some of the potential limitations which might emerge from the new counter-discourse of chosen singlehood, and from the fetishism of choice in the feminist movement in general.
Lumsden, Karen. Loughborough University and Morgan, Heather. University of Aberdeen. Back to the (feminist) future?: deconstructing (gendered) online abuse
In The Aftermath of Feminism, McRobbie (2009: 10) pledges to dissect ‘management of social change’ in which ‘forms of gender power…operate within an illusion of positivity and progress while locking young women into “new-old” dependences and anxieties’. In recent years, the proliferation of social media and shift to living out ‘real life’ in virtual, online spaces point to a significant ‘social change’, one promising both positivity and progress, and democratic spaces in which voices of all social groups can be heard. However, far from being ‘managed’, these spaces can subject women to ‘a sexualised surveillant gaze’ that has failed to be disrupted by criminal policy dialogue (Bailey and Steeves, 2013). First ‘fraping’, then ‘trolling’, now ‘revenge porn’, which all represent symbolic and real online abuses, especially of women and minority groups. We deconstruct gendered abuse using the following case studies of cyber-crime and online deviance. First, ‘fraping’, the act of violating an individual’s social media profile/page, normalising rape culture and the use of violent language. Second, ‘trolling’, involving posting off-topic messages in online communities with the deliberate aim of directly upsetting another member. Finally, ‘revenge porn’: the non-consensual public posting of sexually explicit images of a person. We argue that these forms of online abuse often victimise women in particular and in gendered ways (Lumsden and Morgan, 2014). Whilst there is a developing spectrum of policing responses, online abuse contexts and settings mean that they are usually perceived as ‘different’ – in fact, less serious. Moreover, aggregated online abuses of women are almost disregarded. The combined effects of these shades of victimisation and discrimination call for action and further feminist research and theorising in order to explore the myriad ways in which both female and feminist voices are constructed, received, and responded to online, and of means of tackling online abuse.
Lussich, Dolores María. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Tensions and bridges: between Queer Theory and fourth wave feminism.
Regarding the question posed by Kira Cochrane (Cochrane: 2013) on the “undertheorisation” of fourth-wave feminism and its link with political engagement, we will examine the historical links between Queer Theory and French feminism. In “The Queer Turn in Feminism”, Anne Berger shows how notions like ‘gender’, ‘performance’ and ‘sexual difference’ have travelled back and forth between France and North America, to now re-enter the French academic world (Berger: 2013). Despite the appearance of being “new” or “imported” to French academic debates, the central concepts behind Queer Theory have a complex temporality, since literature has become more and more transnational. My hypothesis in this paper is that third-wave feminism has been “monopolized” by Queer Theory and that this carries some undesirable political consequences for feminism. In support of this view, I follow a genealogical perspective on the founding premises of this tradition. By doing this, new strategic and philosophical horizons can be opened facing the challenges put forth by fourth-wave feminism.
McGuinness, Caoimhe. Queen Mary University of London. Feminist Fringes.
This paper will analyse the relationship between contemporary mainstream feminist theatre in London and its ‘fringes’. This in turn will serve as an exploration of contemporary mainstream British feminist discourses as it rubs against its own fringes, specifically with regards to sex work and Islam.
Recent years have seen a visible resurgence of explicit feminist plays making it onto London’s mainstream stages. Shows such as Nic Green’s Trilogy (Barbican, 2010), Carrie Cracknell’s Blurred Lines (The Shed, National Theatre, 2014) or Ontrorend Goed’s Sirens (Soho Theatre, 2014/15) have all attempted to tackle the ‘condition of women today’.
However, the broad scope of these plays carries a certain set of problems. These problems highlight certain tendencies within ‘fourth wave feminism’ as well as a liberal conception of the theatrical space. In an attempt to make feminism both more palatable and all-embracing, these new plays often display an under-examination of their own historical and geographical positionality. Wanting to resonate with women everywhere, these plays rely on superficial tropes pertaining to issues regarding sex work or Muslim women. Far from being innovative, these tropes remain firmly grounded in a misogynistic and orientalist history in which women serve as metaphors for debasement and white supremacy.
I will twin the conception of mainstream feminism with that of the mainstream theatrical space in order to argue for a reappraisal of ‘fringe’ feminist performance art as producing a potentially more emancipating aesthetic. In order to do so I will consider the materialist approaches of Kathy Weeks and Sylvia Federici as well specific sex work activist texts and Sianne Ngai’s investigation of ‘ugly feelings’ (2007). Although fringe feminist performance might get dismissed for ‘preaching to the converted’ (Miller & Román, 1995), the specific material and experiential grounding of the issues tackled by artists such as Katy Baird or GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN might in fact enhance a more sophisticated and plural feminist approach.
McKnight, Heather. University of Brighton. Reclaiming the Night: Fatal Intersections in Concrete Spaces
When Foucault’s states “it is not possible to disregard the fatal intersection of time with space” it has a particular resonance with Reclaim the Night, a march that highlights when the intersection of night changes the streets into a potentially violent and terrifying space.
During Reclaim the Night march in Brighton the space of the street becomes the site of direct action for not only women, but the diverse intersectionality of the feminist movement and other marginalised groups. It is a site where people can stand their ground, a space where visibility of violence and discrimination, all too often swept into dark corners, can be obtained. The streets become Foucault’s heterotopian space, full of potential and conflict, thus a location for realising Blochian utopian functions. At the march utopia is realised as a critique of the here and now; diverse groups seize on the march as a way of embedding a geography of hope across the city. The march takes over the cities in which we live our day to day, or perhaps more appropriately, day to night lives.
Through examining how Reclaim the Night embodies Foucault’s heterotopian principles we can begin to see a more nuanced picture of the utopian functions taking place on this site of action. In the broader Reclaim the Night movement we see the autopoietic process of heterotopias emerging within heterotopias, pushing the boundaries of how society moves and changes as a reaction to what it sees in the mirror. Far from having a fixed significance or implication, the physical act of occupying this space is part of a complex and evolving movement that seeks to materialise a new world of tolerance and understanding, the edges of which are fractious and ever changing with the awareness of our own and others’ identities, and the evolution of those identities themselves.
Morar, Cristina. Institut Universitaire de France. Brain and beauty: Renewed engagements with feminist thought through the body.
This study proposes to reflect on the renewal of feminist thought by drawing from two original, although very different contributions to contemporary feminist debates : Catherine Malabou’s essay Changing difference, and La Révolution du féminin by Camille Froidevaux- Metterie. In Changing difference, the French philosopher offers a critical discussion of deconstructionist and gender and queer theories, which both deny the woman any essence. For Malabou, essence can only be ‘plastic,’ understood here as the power to resist and to transform the persistent violence endured by women – whether sexual, economic or philosophical –, into a malleable form of being. As an example of the potentiality of this plastic and resistant mode of being, one may think of Malabou’s own philosophical engagement with the ‘brain’, the very thing which used to legitimate the exclusion of women from philosophy.
The gesture of the French political theorist Camille Froidevaux-Metterie is also bold, as her recent essay La révolution du féminin unexpectedly argues in favour of a positive consideration of beauty and self-care as a new way to give meaning to the feminine body and subjectivity. The body is no longer taken to be, in Western societies at least, the reason for women’s alienation, as it has been held by numerous feminists, but the vector of women’s lived realities, be it through their care for themselves or through motherhood, understood as a relational rather than a biological disposition.
Both theorists thus intend to open new avenues for feminist thought, out of the universalist / differentialist or essentialist / anti-essentialist alternatives, reinterpreting the feminine bodily experience as having in itself the potential for changing the very human condition, as Froidevaux-Metterie argues. One can wonder, though, if the body is the only way for women to invest philosophical discourse or give meaning to and act upon their own existence.
Ni Cheallaigh, Gillian. King’s College London. ‘But I really think about my feminism!’ Paperback Feminism and the Academy
How do we in the business of feminist theory, and feminist literary theory, respond to the emergence of mass-market or so-called Paperback Feminism such as Caitlin Moran’s How to be a Woman? When a columnist for a widely-read broadsheet newspaper, with a background in music journalism, decides to write a book on feminism, and succeeds in attracting mass media and public attention and readership, do we welcome this intervention (to use Spivak’s term) as a widening of the debate and the successful dissemination of the core ideas and principles of the feminist project? Or do we shudder with contempt, as one student who exclaimed in response to Moran’s intervention: 'But I have really thought about my feminism!’
What should we make of the condescending – almost allergic – response of some intellectuals and feminist theorists (including postgraduate students on a Master’s level course on feminist theory) to the very idea of this kind of book as intellectually, theoretically and by implication, politically inferior? Does this response suggest that Moran and other paperback or popular culture feminist writers have not thought long and hard about 'their’ feminism? That they are not intellectual, or even intelligent, enough? Does it imply that in order to talk with authority about feminism, or from a feminist platform, you have to have read a copious amount of feminist theory, or even studied these theories in a formal way?
Conversely, if popular-culture feminism, and of course also particularly digital feminism, is the direction the debate appears very much to be taking, does this mean the theoretical fora, and the academics and theorists inhabiting those fora, are out-dated and obsolete? Has pop-culture feminism left feminist theory trailing in its wake?
This paper will attempt to suggest responses to some of these questions, but will in particular aim to pose these questions in a reflective way, and offer a means of reconciling popular, paperback feminism with the theoretical dimension.
Phipps, Alison. University of Sussex (KEYNOTE). Identity, experience, choice and responsibility: feminism in a neoliberal and neoconservative age
Why did some feminists leap to Julian Assange’s defence when he was accused of rape? Why are issues like gender and Islam and the sexindustry discussed in binaries of oppression and empowerment, force andchoice, with nothing in between? How did the feminist critique of themedicalisation of childbirth turn into a normalising imperative for the natural’? In this talk, based on her book The Politics of the Body, Alison Phipps explores the difficulties of positioning for contemporary feminisms in a situation where rejecting the radical feminist co-optation by neoconservative discourses often involves themobilisation of neoliberal rationalities which depoliticise ideasaround agency, experience and identity. She argues for a structural,intersectional feminist analysis which helps us to make sense of our post-structural, 'post-feminist’ world.
Reidy, Fiona. University of Amsterdam. More than a Mother: Reproducing HERstory, a feminist analysis of the discourse and power structures of abortion and women’s rights rhetoric.
“I felt I was bending to some ancient form, too ancient to question. This is what women have always done…under Patriarchy female possibility has been literally massacred on the site of motherhood” (Rich, A. 1976 : 13-25)
According to American political Sociologist, Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, there is a long standing tension in feminist theory between an emphasis on equality and that of women’s autonomy, in particular in relation to the assumption of a woman’s natural position to reproduce and the debate about her “rights” for self-determination of her own bodily autonomy. (Petchesky, 1980)
In an age when feminism is arguably undergoing a fourth wave and, as the purpose of this conference addresses, women’s voices are being delivered with unprecedented power, I will discuss the age old question of women’s traditionalist position as mother and raise questions on the power and voices that are permitted to speak in this so-called advanced age of feminist debate. In particular, I will examine the issues surrounding a recent grassroots activist movement on abortion in the Republic of Ireland, which formed part of a 10 month qualitative research study for my Masters Thesis in 2014, and highlight key questions which contribute to a critical analysis of the discourse of current feminism.
What knowledge is allowed to circulate? By who’s authority? To the exclusion of what? Through in-depth interviews and critical discourse analysis, the research gives space to the unauthorised knowledge of emerging activists, creates both a historical and contemporary examination of the narrative on abortion and women’s “rights” and reflects on the challenges posed to stigma and silence, via a re-imagined discourse. It also challenges the language and mechanisms of power used to drive debate and demands reflection on the modern feminist agenda.
Roberts, Tangwen. Cardiff University. Uniting Online: The ripplings of a fourth wave of feminism
Following an increasing media and online interest in the prospect of a fourth wave of feminism, this research explores the possibilities of a new wave of feminism enabled by, and expressed through, the creation of community on social media. Having outlined the numerous complexities and issues involved in interpreting social movements through the wave metaphor, and charting the development of this imagery from oceanic to Ednie Kaeh Garrison’s radio waves of the third wave, I will argue that social media has helped to create new digital communities within feminism.
Through a quasi-qualitative analysis of UK and US-based feminist blogs in the first three months of 2014, I will explore what feminism means to the contributors to these blogs, and how they define their own feminist identities. I will also argue that two communities (men and transwomen), whose participation in feminism have historically been controversial, are now encouraged into a more accessible online community. I will also examine the offline issues which these two communities face, including violence and the concept of toxic masculinity and suggest that this new inclusion has brought about a shift in the key interests of Western feminism.
I will argue that the last 18 months of feminist activism organised online is creating a cultural tipping point in the way in which feminism and feminist issues are being taken notice off, often with a more global reach of interaction and debate than previous waves.
Townsend, Sage. London College of Fashion. Fashionable Feminism
Given the persuasive power of fashion to shape women’s perceptions of themselves, I would strongly argue that a feminist voice needs to be placedfirmly within the industry to ensure their psychological and physical wellbeing. It is up to designers to embrace equality and to champion fashion’ssignificance and influence on choice and the representation of identity. Historically, the use of fashion as a feminist tool has proven to be highly effective, from the first wave of feminism - the women’s suffragette movement of the early 1900s - to the second wave bra-burning activists of the 1970s and Katherine Hamnet’s iconic slogan t-shirts of the 1980s. Far from the Barbie ideal, “these women made fashion a moral issue,” states Linda Scott, author of “Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism” (Linda Scott, 2006). In recent collections by fashion designers Rick Owens, Walter Van Beirendonck and Miuccia Prada to name a few, issues such as race and feminism have been explored through political activity on the catwalk (Style.com, 2014). In a commanding performance in the Spring/Summer 2014 collection in Paris, Rick Owens replaced ‘Barbie ideal’ runway models with his ‘Team Vicious’ a predominantly African-American, physically strong-bodied female step team (Dazed Digital, 2014). The aim was to celebrate racial and body diversity through movement and fierce emotion, which Owens himself described his show as ground breaking in the ‘rejection of conventional beauty’ (FashionTV, 2014). It will be interesting to see if Owens continues to develop this challenge to limited, conventional notions of beauty in future work, and how far it will encourage other fashion designers to follow suit.
Such tactics may, on the other hand, be viewed as tokenistic and attention seeking. Karl Lagerfeld’s Spring/Summer 2015 new look for Chanel, modelled again largely by white models bearing slogans on political banners, some of which such as ‘Free Freedom’, might be described as meaningless (Jess Cartner-Morley, 2014). Given that only a few seasons ago (Autumn/Winter 2013) Lagerfeld’s ‘supermarket show’ focused on female consumerism, we may wonder how authentic he is in his recently declared feminist leanings, and question whether he is in fact merely jumping on a trendy and passing political band-wagon.
According to Lorraine Candy, the editor-in-chief of Elle, “Feminism is an important issue for Elle readers. But we’ve learnt, through engagement with our readers via our website and social media, that young women are confused as to what it means and whether it is relevant to them.” (Front-End Fashion, 2013) Acknowledging what feminism actually stands for and what women throughout history, such as the Suffragette movement, have done for equality today would clearly help to alleviate this confusion. As feminist author, Jennifer Baumgardner confirms, ‘these feminists changed our culture, shepherding in dress reform, birth control, and granting women the right to vote, own property, get divorced, be educated, keep their income and inheritance, and retain custody of their children’ (2011, P.247).
However, in spite of such achievements, we now see Feminism being introduced as a kind of glamorised brand concept, and might question the value of Elle’s campaign in November 2013 to “rebrand” Feminism, where Feminist publications Vagenda and Feminist Times were invited to work with advertising agencies to rework its terminology (Alexander Fury, 2014).
Feminism has also recently been promoted by Beyoncé who was captured by media standing before a glowing sign proclaiming herself as “FEMINIST”, whilst grinding on a pole and singing ‘Bow Down Bitches’, at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2014 (Daisy Wyatt, 2014). Is this just another display of ‘fashionable feminism’ that fails to focus upon the serious underlying issues of women’s equality and wellbeing? It further begs the question as to whether any individual other than a celebrity has the power to influence the masses. Would my work have far greater reach if worn by the likes of Katharine Hamnett or by Nicky Minaj booty dropping on the red carpet? The concern here is that feminism is merely becoming a trendy word with no real substance or meaning for fashion audiences. More disturbing still, is that by making it a mere fast-fashion, flavour-of-the-season concept, usage of the term feminism is at risk of losing all impact in the future.
Turner, Emily. University of Cambridge. How does news reporting of rape cases demonstrate rape culture?: A study focusing on news coverage of the Steubenville Rape.
In this study I tackle the issue of rape culture in the media, focusing on how the way in which the media reports on rape trials contains and promotes victim blaming. Previous studies have shown the level of influence that the media is able to have over people’s ideologies (Hovarth et al., 2012) and have demonstrated this in regard to rape culture (Bohner, 2001; Frazer & Miller, 2009). However, these studies often to fail to fully engage with the linguistic techniques used to promote this victim blaming ideology and the problems associated with it.
My study uses the case of the Steubenville Rape and the news reports surrounding it in order to demonstrate just how subtly the media is able to shift blame from the rapists to the victim. I discuss three main ways of this happening: transitivity, implicature and evaluative language. These linguistic tools allow us to unpack how reporters are able to affect people’s opinions without the public being aware that they are being influenced. With transitivity, I demonstrate the use of passive voice when reporting on the rape – leading to the victim being placed as the active participant. In implicature I exemplify how the news is not reporting bias-free facts but instead placing their own judgments within the text. Finally I discuss evaluative language with a focus on the different ways in which the reporters describe the victim and the rapists, helping us empathise with the rapists and blame the victim.
This research provides a base for future study on media reports of rape cases as well as reports related to rape culture. It presents an overview of how a subtle ideology can be presented in the news, the effects it may have and suggestions as to how we can work against this.
Uematsu, Nozomi. University of Sussex. A Twisted “Liberation” of Feminism?: a Rhetorical analysis of contemporary Japan’s governmental Campaign ‘A Country in which Women Shine’
This paper will examine the political rhetoric of a recent movement by the Japanese government called ‘A Country in which Women Shine’, begun in 2012. It has been 4 years since the enormous earthquake and following tsunami hit North East Japan, and the disaster led Japan into far right-wing politics. In leading his Cabinet as Prime Minister in 2012, Abe Shinzou emphasises the significance of economic reformation, and he clarified that a vital constituent of the reformation is “Womenomics”, unleashing the potential of which is ‘an absolute must if Japan’s growth is to continue’. The term “Womenomics” first appeared in 1999, coined by Kathy Matsui and others in Goldman Sachs, claiming that the Japanese economy ‘could increase its gross domestic product by as much as 15% simply by tapping further its most underutilized resource — Japanese women’. In current Japanese society, women only occupy a shocking 1% of executive corporate positions, one of the lowest proportions globally for a developed country. Abe claims that expanding women’s employment ultimately increases the birth rate, and that Womenomics is the key to developing Japan: ‘a country that hires and promotes more women grows economically, and no less important, demographically as well.’
In the same speech, Abe proposes his intention to ‘create a Japan in which women shine’ and acknowledges the difficulties for families to balance work and child-nurturing. Abe’s speech sheds light on the significance of domestic labour such as nurturing children and nursing the elderly, considering those works as fundamental to the ‘vitality’ of the nation, which indeed seem a significant social improvement. However, we cannot dismiss the close connection that his rhetoric creates between domestic labour and the right-wing notion of ‘a Strong Japan’, and as such, the “feminism” that Japan offers needs more careful investigation for its structure and value system.
Van der Zaag, Annette-Carina. Goldsmiths College. Thought Beyond the Binaries.
This paper explores the so-called fourth wave of feminism as a wave that is marked by an unproblematic ‘return’ to Woman as the subject of feminism. By virtue of the problems it seeks to address, this wave appears to define feminism as the struggle for freedom from patriarchal oppression as it relates to women’s problems. Moreover, Woman as the universal subject of feminism has become an identity that functions as a point of assembly.
In academic feminism, an essentialist notion of Woman has been problematised since the first critiques on Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex. Critical race feminists rightfully pointed out the whiteness of Woman and consequentially the racist lines of power enacted by feminism at the time. A few years later, Judith Butler took on Woman, now the subject of feminist identity politics, as a heteronormative construct that worked to exclude those who fail to exist within a male/female binary of heterosexual desire. I argue that these problematics re-emerge with the feminist practices of the fourth wave, a re-emergence due to the lack of theory this wave produces and its separation from academic feminism.
However, instead of focusing on my annoyances with this fourth wave, I ask: what kind of feminism does this wave make possible? Building on Elizabeth Grosz’ notion of freedom, I argue that what is at stake for contemporary feminism is to be able to play a serious part in the creation of a future unlike the present. Key to this project is a focus on collaboration to be able to inhabit the democratisation of knowledge production through new media that fourth wave feminists do so well, but do so in full consciousness of the debates that have gone before, the mechanisms of power at stake in our practices and the danger of being co-opted by those powers we seek to resist.
Vigo, Julian. Independent Scholar, Artist and Film-maker. Fourth Wave Feminism and Neoliberal Politics: The No-Platforming of Difference and Commodification of Gender
Since January 2013, gender-critical feminism has been heatedly at odds with intersectional feminism. Indeed, the fourth wave of feminism cannot simply be described as a composition of theories which are largely in agreement, but rather it would more accurately be characterized through this current debate of gender and the concomitant conflicts that emerge when there is a silencing of one side of this debate and when others claim their lives are being threatened by theory. On the one hand there is trans-feminism which assert intersectionalism as its mandate for whom gender is self-identified, and on the other gender-critical feminism which decries biological essentialism and “gender as identity.” Because of fundamental opposing views, these gender-critical feminists are regularly attacked online, in the media and more recently within academia, through the use of ad hominem, misrepresentations, cyber-trolling and even death and rape threats paradoxically from the very community which claims that these gender-critical feminists (often mis-labelled TERFs since most are not radical feminists) are trying to “kill transwomen” through lanaguage. Various feminists have been black-listed because of their gender critical views, this being inappropriately being labelled as “transphobic,” and academic institutions have, overall, made little effort to create room for healthy debate on this matter as the recent invective by Sara Ahmed towards gender critical stances wherein she deems that they “should not be understood as feminism.” Indeed, if what is “really” feminism is being decided by a few, then the very basis of this fourth wave necessitates a closer examination.
My paper will address this divisive terrain of gender politics focussing upon the aporia of difference that is at the heart of this debate, a difference which is often tied to sameness–the sameness of oppression (and the language of oppression which both groups cling to) and the sameness of being (whilst being in the body necessarily maintains its own difference from the transwoman to the biological woman). Similarly, difference (of criticism) is being largely suppressed with of identity politics overwhelming any possibility for power analysis. For gender-critical feminists, “gender as identity” creates the illusion of radicalism but reproduces the same problematic structures which seek to homogenize the subject, eradicate difference and, paradoxically, remove any antagonistic voices which seek dialogue and understanding, not the “death of the trans community” as is often exaggeratedly misrepresented. Ultimately these gender-critical feminists question this turn of neoliberalism which repackages reactionary ideas and reimagines freedom as unlimited consumer choice, creating a milieu where gender is a product and freedom is but yet another consumer choice.
Goodwyn, Helena & Hogg, Emily. Room for Confidence: Early Career Feminists in the English Department
PhD students occupy a liminal position. In research and teaching practice you are a member of the academic community, and yet you remain simultaneously a student. Embodying a feminist politics in the classroom and in one’s research practices whilst in this transitional stage is fraught with anxieties and concerns. For example, in an increasingly casualised workforce, PhD students and many Early Career Researchers are required to shoulder responsibility for teaching without the academic staff member’s traditional resources - without, for example, private offices in which to hold student consultations, plan seminars or mark work. Such a concern might sound petty or acquisitive. However this paper will focus on the seemingly innocuous, everyday ways in which the contemporary research environment can tend to subtly re-entrench patterns of exclusion based on race, gender and class. Our reflections will be focalised through the lens of our experiences of reading and teaching Virginia Woolf’s canonical essay ‘A Room of One’s Own;’ we turn to Woolf’s links between literature and money to ask how the teaching of literature today is shaped by universities’ economic restrictions, consider the effects these have on women and, in particular, on female authority in the seminar room. ‘A Room of Ones Own’ also stages a critique of the distorting effects of ‘anger and bitterness’ on women’s writing, and we use this argument to consider self-presentation and network building for the female scholar within the English department today. How much ‘anger and bitterness’ is allowable, advisable or useful? Finally, Woolf suggests that ‘Life for both sexes […] is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle […] More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion that we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. ‘ We ask: how might identifying as a feminist in the English department help one to find ways to develop the ‘imponderable’ but ‘invaluable’ confidence Woolf describes?
Harper, Matthew. The fourth wave and the intersection between feminism and technology.
Writers such as Baumgardner (2011), Cochrane (2013) and Penny (2014) have identified the Internet as a key characteristic of the fourth wave of feminism. In some ways, this is hardly surprising, since information technology has come to dominate our media landscape, and since 2007 women have been the primary users of most social media sites (Hargittai, 2007). A result of this is that issues which concern women have come to the fore, both online and in society as a whole. Similarly, social media in particular provides unprecedented opportunities for people to find others with the same concerns, so that communities can emerge rapidly and with little attention to geographical boundaries.
However, at the same time as feminism has been gaining momentum online, technology commentators such as Turkle (2011), Keen (2012, 2015) and Morozov (2011, 2013) have been drawing attention to more troubling aspects of modern technologies. This concern is not so much that the same social media tools are available to terrorists, or in the case of feminism, to popular misogynists; but that the Internet frames the kind of discussion that takes place, how it takes place, or whether ‘discussion’ takes place at all. Indeed, it can be argued that the idea of an ‘Internet’, as opposed to a number of disparate ‘internets’, is itself a myth perpetuated, consciously or not, by those with a vested interest in a particular kind of technological solutionism. Challenging this monolithic conception of the Internet has a number of implications for how feminism and technology may intersect, some of which will be addressed in my talk.
Edwards, Natalie. Fourth Wave Feminism and the Rejection of Motherhood.
This paper is based upon research I have carried out for my forthcoming book, Voicing Voluntary Childlessness: Narratives of Non-Mothering in Contemporary France (Peter Lang’s Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing series). In this project, I survey first-person literary accounts of the rejection of motherhood in post-2000 French women’s writing.
In this presentation, I first survey the way in which the rejection of motherhood has been theorized in second and third wave feminism. Beginning with Simone de Beauvoir, I show that maternity has been a thorny issue within feminist theory and has been the source of much division within organised feminism. Turning to the issue of non-mothering, I examine how several early theorists, such as Elinor Burkett and Marion Faux, were vilified by other feminists, most notably Betty Friedan, for suggesting that rejecting motherhood was a way of obtaining liberation from constraining models of motherhood.
I then examine current theorizations of the rejection of motherhood by theorists such as Elisabeth Badinter, Christine Delphy and Françoise Héritier. In texts published within the last decade, these three critics have pointed to the regressive discourse concerning motherhood in contemporary Western societies. All three posit the rejection of motherhood as a long-standing taboo and view the reconciliation of feminism and the rejection of motherhood as a crucial step towards an inclusive feminist politics.
Finally, I compare two theoretical texts that portray the rejection of motherhood: Lucie Joubert’s L’Envers du landau (2010) and Edith Vallée’s Pas d’enfant dit-elle: les refus de la maternité (2005). These two texts exemplify two different attitudes towards the rejection of motherhood by women who both identify as feminist. Joubert is an academic from Québec and Vallée is a psychoanalyst from France, yet both write texts that universalize the question of non-mothering and call for a different approach to both motherhood and non-motherhood within feminist theory.
Lawrence, Emilie. Riding the Fourth Wave and Challenging Misogyny; Funnymism, Digital Sisterhood and Taking the Online Offline
Existing research has positioned social media sites as spaces of hostility for feminists; (Shaw, 2014; Jane, 2012 & 2014; Harp, Loke & Bachmann, 2012) citing the existence of ‘e-bile’ (Jane, 2012) and women being disproportionately targeted by trolls (Shifman & Lemish, 2010; Rightler-McDaniels &Hendrikson, 2013) An interesting paradox that emerges from research into e-bile is that the most violent and personal of threats can seem generic and predictable as a result of the frequency with which they are used. Attackers become one homogenous voice – coalescing their vitriol into one endless stream of abuse.Research into HOW this abuse is managed and challenged by feminists, however, is lacking. Drawing on Fotopoulou’s understanding of the ‘digital sisterhood’ (2013) and utilising a fourth wave feminist lens, my research aims to explore the ways in which feminists are challenging online abuse through three case studies; humour – i.e. the use of humour to resist and disrupt dominantrepresentations of gender . Internet humour replicates and reproduces hegemonic norms but Gallivan (1992) suggests that feminist humour differs in that it is ‘humour which reveals and ridicules the absurdity of gender stereotypes and gender based inequalities.’ My second case study is to explore feminist solidarity online; Feminist hashtags and social media spaces as sites for discussion have inherent potential. They allow women to carve out safe spaces in which they may feel more empowered to share their own experiences and substantiate other women’s testimonies. The final case study will navigate the transcending of boundaries from online activism to offline action; socialmedia provides a platform for discourse and rhetoric that can then be taken offline – I will be examining the tweets to the streets examples of SlutWalks and ProteinWorld advert protests.
BIOGRAPHIES
Dr Gemma Commane (Aston University) is a sociologist and cultural theorist. The main focus of her research is on areas of social exclusion, specifically in relation to youth subcultures, sexual deviancy, intoxication and pleasure, place and class, and gender non-conformity in alternative lifestyles. Gemma’s research interests and teaching specialisms also include youth and deviancy, fetish and BDSM clubbing cultures, class and inequality, creative protest, burlesque striptease, body modification and ethnography. Gemma is currently part of the research team for CITISPYCE at Aston University. Publications include ‘Double reflexivity: the politics of friendship fieldwork and representation within ethnographic studies of young people’ co-authored with Professor Shane Blackman and ‘Bad Girls and Dirty Bodies Performative Histories and Transformative Styles.’
Izzy Fox: I am a GREP (Graduate Research Education Programme) PhD candidate in the School of English, Drama and Film in UCD, based in the Humanities Institute. My thesis is a Digital Humanities research project exploring the Irish Feminist Network (IFN) in the context of digital activism. The interdisciplinary approach adopted incorporates feminist theory, discourse analysis and cultural studies.
Dr Andrea Hajek is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Glasgow. She obtained her doctorate degree from the University of Warwick, and her first book, on the negotiation of public memories of protests in 1970s Italy, was published in 2013 (Palgrave Macmillan). She is the Managing Editor for the journal Memory Studies, an Associate Editor for Modern Italy, and she is a founding member of the Warwick Oral History Network. Her research interests include memory studies (in particular cultural, (inter)generational and digital memories, commemorative practices and cultural trauma), social movements, 1968 and the long 1970s, the history and memory of feminism, gender, and oral history methodology.
Dr Rumana Hashem is a Post-doctoral researcher, affiliated with the Centre for Migration Refugees and Belonging at University of East London. Originally a rights-activist, Rumana actively contributes to the Phulbari Solidarity Group as a Founder and Coordinator, Nari Diganta as a key organising member, and London Roots Collective as a Facilitator and Trainer. She taught on sociology, gender studies and psychosocial modules at the University of Leicester, University of East London and BRAC University. At University of East London she completed her PhD on gendered relations in the armed conflict in south-east Bangladesh.
Her research interests and publications include narratives of sexuality and ethnicity, gendered violence and women’s resistance; aboriginal culture and intersectionality; gendered embodiments of nationalism, belonging and community activism; and research ethics in conflict and humanitarian crisis. Her recent articles have been published in the Sage Research Cases Methodologies and DIEGESIS, with others forthcoming. Her book Reinterpreting Narratives of Jumma Women and Men: A Situated Gaze to Armed Conflict and Sexual Violence (2016, Dhaka: University Press Limited) is forthcoming. She serves the ENQUIRE and the Journal of Social Science as a peer-reviewer.
Dr Tamsin Hinton-Smith is Associate Director of the Centre for Gender Studies and Senior Lecturer in Higher Education at the University of Sussex, UK. She is currently working on a Marie Skłodowska-Curie project on ‘Higher Education Internationalisation and Mobility: Inclusions, Equalities and Innovations’ (HEIM) with colleagues in the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER) at the University of Sussex, and partners from the University of Seville, Umea University Sweden, and Roma Education Fund in Budapest, Hungary.
Samantha Joeck. Born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, Samantha Joeck graduated from New York University in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology. Currently in her second year of a master’s degree in sociology and gender studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, she is working on a thesis under the supervision of anthropologist Klaus Hamberger. This project is based on ethnographic research concerning street remarks and women’s feelings of insecurity in public spaces in Bogota, Colombia. Samantha’s academic interests include social and feminist geography, Latin American feminism and masculinity studies, and transnational feminism.
Dr. Kinneret Lahad is an assistant professor at the NCJW Women and Gender Studies program at the Tel-Aviv University, Israel. She is a sociologist and a cultural studies, feminist scholar. Her main research and teaching interests include Feminism and Cultural Studies, Singlehood, Family and Gender, Global Families, Theories of Social Time, Ageism and Sexism, Self-help culture and the study of Social Emotions. Her book, A Table for One: A Critical Reading of Singlehood and Time is currently under advanced contract with SUNY press.
Dolores Lussich is a Philosophy professor from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis on Contemporary Philosophy and Gender Studies, in a joint PHD between Paris VIII and the University of Buenos Aires, with a doctoral scholarship awarded by the CONICET. She is a member of the research laboratories LEGS-CNRS and UBA-IIEGE. She has published in several specialized magazines like Instantes y Azares. Perspectivas Nietzscheanas She has also worked in social organisations on disability, domestic violence and violence against women. She has also dictated private seminars on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Caoimhe Mader McGuinness is an AHRC funded postgraduate research student at the Drama Department of Queen Mary University of London. Her current research project centres on liberal constructions of sociality and relationality in theatre, and how some performances might resist these. She has been published in Contemporary Theatre Review, Theatre Survey and Studia Dramatica. She presented at various conferences including Radical Negativity (Goldsmiths College) and IFTR in 2014 and Sound Acts: Performance/Music/Identity in Athens in April 2015.
Her research interests are ‘antisocial’ queer theory, Marxism and Frankfurt School theorists, particularly with regards to how these might relate to liberal narratives of inclusion within the theatrical space. The scope of her research centres on contemporary European and British theatre.
Heather McKnight is a MA Student in Cultural and Critical Theory at the University of Brighton. She is a member of the Editorial Board for the Critical Studies Journal and on a member of the Critical Studies Research Group Steering Committee. Coming from a working background in equalities, campaigning and education research, she has worked for charities, students’ unions and local government, and has also being an elected member of the NUS Scotland Women’s Committee. She is founder of the social enterprise Magnetic Ideals.
Dr Cristina Morar completed a Ph.D. in political theory at the University of Ottawa in September 2014. Focusing mainly on the work of E. Levinas and J. Derrida, her thesis examines the emergence of a materialist philosophical gesture in contemporary thought, conceived as a more sensible and thus ethical way of approaching existence and meaning in the aftermath of the Second World War. She pursues this interrogation on a bodily and emotional approach to identity and belonging, thought and writing in her postdoctoral research on the topics of the “feminine” and the “woman” in contemporary French theory.
A former BBC journalist, Dr Gillian Ni Cheallaigh is a Lecturer in French at King’s College London, where she completed her PhD in 2015. Her thesis focuses on the figure of the madwoman in women-authored French novels of the 20th and 21st centuries, in particular Simone de Beauvoir, 1970s author Emma Santos and contemporary author Linda Lê.
Gillian’s main interests are 20th and 21st century literature; feminism(s) and women’s writing, and psychoanalysis. Recent publications include a co-edited volume Quand la folie parle: The Dialectic Effect of Madness in French Literature since the Nineteenth Century, Ni Cheallaigh, Jackson and McIlvanney, eds. (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014) in which she has a chapter on women-authored asylum narratives; a number of articles and chapters on Linda Lê including an article in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies (Sites) vol.18:4 (2014); and a chapter on Emma Santos in Autour de l'extrême littéraire, Hemmens and Willams, eds. (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2012).
Dr Alison Phipps is Director of Gender Studies at the University of Sussex. She works on issues to do with the politics of gender and the body: sexual violence, sex work, childbirth, breastfeeding and abortion. She is also interested in ‘lad cultures’ and their relationship to sexual violence.
Tangwen Roberts. Having graduated with a BA (Hons) in English Literature and Cultural Criticism from Cardiff University in 2012 Tangwen has recently completed an MA in Women’s Studies at The University of York. During this time she developed an interest in the relationship between contemporary feminist cultural activism and the changing media landscape, which led to her dissertation exploring the possibility of a fourth wave of feminism online.
Returning to Cardiff University last year Tangwen has just completed a postgraduate diploma in Magazine Journalism and uses her writing to challenge the dominant and often damaging discourses surrounding young women and teenagers which are increasingly proliferated online as well as in print. She is a regular contributor to new digital platforms The Debrief and Hello Giggles.
Liselle Terret joined the Performing Arts department at Coventry University in 2014, following ten years as Applied Theatre lecturer at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Most recently Liselle completed a Curatorial Practice Website(www.lipsickqueerfeministneoburlesque.wordpress.com) that archives and articulates a series of ‘low art’ symposiums. She also makes queer feminist neo-burlesque as Doris La Trine , critiqued by Nally C, (2012) Naked Exhibitionism: Gendered Performance and Public Exposure& has performed with Annie Sprinkle (The Chelsea Theatre 2008). Liselle also recently wrote for Research In Drama Education: Applied Theatre & Performance),Queering Mantle of The Expert that documents a project for primary-aged children. She is currently researcher for the Performance-Making Diploma for learning disabled adults with Access All Areas at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama funded by The Leverhulme Trust. Liselle co-initiated and co-formed his course which has nominated by The Guardian University a Equality and Diversity award.
Sage Townsend is a British artist and designer/maker, based in London. Sage has recently completed an MA in Fashion Artefact at the London College of Fashion. Aiming to imbue her work with a cross cultural dialogue about attitudes and aesthetic values relating to female genitalia, the underlying message of her creative projects is that expectations should be challenged by promoting fashion accessories to act as more than just functional or aesthetic objects and to define their role as a platform to explore and address political, ethical and social ideas and expectations.
Emily Turner has just completed her Masters in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She previously studied an MA in English Language at the University of Glasgow with a year abroad at the University of Calgary in Canada. It was here that she became interested in how much of an effect language is able to have on people and their beliefs. Since then, she has focused her work on looking at how language contributes to the patriarchy, with a view to changing language to improve equality in society.
Nozomi Uematsu is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature, and Sexual Dissidence in Literature and Culture at the University of Sussex. Her thesis was submitted in January 2015, and is titled ‘Monstrous Happiness: A Comparative Study of Maternal and Familial Happiness in Neoliberalism in Japanese and British Women’s Writing in the 1980s’. Her comparative project involved working with English and Japanese women’s writing, critical theories and social discourse in both English and Japanese languages. Her research interest is particularly in contextualising texts in the 1980s, reading maternal and female intimacy in a globalised world from a socio-political perspective.
This thesis was supervised by modernist and contemporary literature and critical theory specialists Dr. Pam Thurschwell and the Director of the Centre for Sexual Dissidence in Literature and Culture, Dr. Rachel O’Connell.
Dr Julian Vigo is a scholar and filmmaker. She has taught comparative literature, anthropology, philosophy and media studies in universities throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa for over twenty-five years. She is currently finishing two books: one which analyzes disappearance in the Americas (New York and Buenos Aires) and the other which examines “cultural violence” in the restructuring of urban space in Fez (Morocco) and the role of shahid(witness, martyr) in Palestine through actions of the female suicide bomber and the various local and media interpretations of her death and life, post-mortem. Her books includePerformative Bodies, Hybrid Tongues:Race, Gender, and Modernity in Latin America and the Maghreb (2010) and her latest book, Earthquake in Haiti (2015). Julian Vigo is also a yogi, permaculturalist, dj and an installation and video artist and has been making ethnographic film and video since 1987.
Helena Goodwyn and Emily Hogg teach in the English department at Queen Mary. Emily completed her PhD in 2014; her research focuses on the relationship between contemporary literature and humans right discourse. She is the co-editor, with Clara Jones (KCL) of the forthcoming collection Influence and Inheritance in Feminist English Studies. Helena is currently in the last few months of writing her doctoral thesis which examines transatlantic literary relationships in late nineteenth century journalism. She is co editor with three other Queen Mary PhD students of English Studies: the State of the Discipline, Past, Present and Future.
Matthew Harper was born in Birmingham in 1973. He studied Philosophy at the University of Lampeter, Wales, and Online and Distance Learning with the Open University. Since 1998 he has been an English teacher in Germany, with positions at the Friedrich Schiller University, Jena and the Euro School, Gera. Since 2008 he has been teaching at the Otto von Guericke University, Magdeburg, where he teaches UNIcert III and IV classes, and a blended learning course on critical thinking and media competence. He is currently looking into beginning his doctoral studies.
Natalie Edwards is British but did her Ph.D. in the US and was Associate Professor of French at Wagner College, New York City, before becoming Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century French and Francophone women’s writing, autobiography and feminist theory. She is the author ofShifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Autobiography (University of Delaware Press, 2011) and of Voicing Voluntary Childlessness: Narratives of Non-Mothering in Contemporary France (Peter Lang’s Contemporary Women’s Writing series, forthcoming).
Annette-Carina van der Zaag is co-chair of The HIV Project housed within the Unit of Play in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths College. Her research practice engages feminist theorisations of the development of novel biomedical HIV prevention methods, such as vaginal microbicides and PrEP. She hold a PhD in Sociology from Goldsmiths College, based on her thesis entitled The Promise of Vaginal Microbicides: configurations of women’s empowerment in a time of HIV. Her forthcoming research will engage PrEP specifically focused on women and sexual difference.
Francesca Hardy completed her PhD in the University of Cambridge French department and her thesis explored the recent bodily turn to film theory. For the past year and a half she has been working as a Teaching Fellow in French and in Film and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen and is about to embark on a project on body hair on film.
The Cu(n)t Bag
Sage Townsend, 2015
Photographer: Capture Factory
Accommodation Suggestions
For those needing accommodation in London for the weekend of the conference, the following (non-exhaustive!) list might provide a starting point.
Stay Queen Mary
Stay Queen Mary has a number of ensuite and standard single rooms located on site in Mile End:
Hotels near Mile End
The following link via hotelscombined.com lists a number of affordable non-campus options in the area:
Further afield
For those looking to be more centrally located, the list assembled by the Institute of Modern Languages Research at the University of London may be of help:
http://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/node/39
Failing all these options please feel free to contact us at feministfutures2015@gmail.com and we will do our best to guide you in the right direction!
-Amaleena, Anna and Alice
CALL FOR PAPERS
As the year 2014 drew to a close, the media’s annual summations were awash with celebratory claims regarding the achievements of feminist individuals and organisations across the world, from the work of grassroots activism to new energy generated by prominent political, cultural and popular talking heads. While The Guardian boldly claimed 2014 to be a watershed year, with women’s voices apparently attaining ‘an unprecedented power’, Time magazine went so far as to state that this ‘may have been the best year for women since the dawn of time’.[1]
This one-day symposium invites critical reflection and debate on what has been called feminism’s ‘fourth wave’. Over the past few years, the ambivalent attitudes that characterised the postfeminist climate of the 1990s and early 2000s have arguably been replaced by a vibrant unveiling of new feminist potencies on the streets and online. The economic crash of 2008, the ensuing austerity measures, and the spread of an insidious rhetoric targeting under-privileged and marginalised groups, have laid bare to many the structural inequalities embedded in the UK. Renewed engagement with feminism has been galvanised in this highly politicised environment by a range of issues that continue to confront women into the twenty-first century, from unequal pay, to the objectification and abuse of women’s bodies, to ‘everyday sexism’. Alongside grassroots activism, and publications aimed at a general readership, this putative ‘fourth wave’ of feminism has mobilised political activity online. In the face of the ever-new forms of misogyny churned out by digital media, feminist internauts are fostering valuable spaces for women to stake their claim to the virtual worlds of the future.
However, there are also concerns being voiced about the directions in which these new feminist energies are channelled. What does it mean when members of the coalition government don T-shirts proclaiming ‘This is what a feminist looks like’? Are the ‘feminist’ advertising campaigns run by the beauty industry cause for celebration or concern? Does feminism really need to be ‘re-branded’ as Elle magazine proposes? What happens when ‘feminist’ discourses are co-opted by the political right? Furthermore, there is a sense that, despite its vigour, this ‘fourth wave’ is undertheorised. As Kira Cochrane put it in in her recent exploration of the feminist resurgence ‘[this movement] hasn’t yet produced a swathe of theory’ (2013: 242).
In response to Cochrane’s concern, this symposium invites reflection and debate on the possibilities, limits and contradictions of ‘fourth wave’ feminist discourse. What specific concerns and issues are being foregrounded by the fourth wave? How do they relate to, reflect on, and advance former feminist and postfeminist debates? What is the relation between the surge in feministactivity on the streets, in the media, in popular culture and online, and critical discourses of feminism? How might feministthought, across the arts and humanities, engage with or theorise this new energy? And what misgivings remain in relation to the rhetoric of a ‘popular’ feminism, one that may well be steeped in neoliberal agenda, easily co-opted and instrumentalised by the very dominant forces that might limit its efficacy? The symposium endeavours to bring ‘academic’ feminism into close contact with broader political and cultural feminist discourses and to illuminate the impact of such debates already being felt within academic contexts themselves.
We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers offering critical perspectives on contemporary feminist debates across the arts and humanities, including philosophy, critical and cultural studies, history, geography, the social sciences, English and Modern Languages. Topics may include, but are not limited, to the following:
* theoretical responses to key debates foregrounded by the fourth wave, including women and work, material and structural inequalities; women’s bodies, sexualities, rape culture and consent, abuse and violence, pornography and sex work; everyday sexism
* feminism and grassroots activism
* feminist campaigns
* feminism and consumer culture
* feminism and popular culture
* feminism and the arts
* feminism online
* feminism and humour
* corporate feminism
* intersectional feminism
* feminism and queer culture
Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to feministfutures2015@gmail.com, along with your name and affiliation, by 5pm on Friday 13th March 2015.
The conference will be a trans-friendly space.
Organisers:
Alice Blackhurst, doctoral candidate in French, University of Cambridge
Amaleena Damlé, Affiliated Lecturer in French, University of Cambridge
Anna Kemp, Lecturer in French, Queen Mary, University of London
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/dec/30/-sp-rebecca-solnit-listen-up-women-are-telling-their-story-now;http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/31/guardian-view-year-feminism-2014-watershed; http://time.com/3639944/feminism-2014-womens-rights-ray-rice-bill-cosby/