Reposting as the deadline is approaching:
Hi All! Please see the attached (and pasted below) CFP for an edited collection on Transnational Feminist Rhetorics titled “(Re)Mobilizing Solidarity: (Re)Mobilizing Solidarity in/and Transnational Feminist Rhetorics” edited by Belinda Walzer, Mais T. Al-Khateeb, Jennifer Nish, and Sweta Baniya. We invite contributions that (re)imagine and (re)articulate transnational feminist rhetorics from varying perspectives and methodologies, particularly as they intersect with human rights, disability studies, affect studies, queer and trans studies, digital humanities, new materialism, decoloniality, and studies of science and technology, health and medicine, etc. Proposals of 500 words are due by August 25th to <transnationalfeministrhetorics> I’d be happy to answer questions if you have them!
(Re)Mobilizing Solidarity in/and Transnational Feminist Rhetorics
Editors: Belinda Walzer, Mais T. Al-Khateeb, Jennifer Nish, Sweta Baniya
We invite chapter proposals for an edited collection that (re)imagines and (re)articulates transnational feminist rhetorics to address the exigencies of violence and oppression generated by global neoliberal capitalism in the 21st century. This collection aims to bring together the voices of established and emerging scholars and activists to (re)mobilize transnational feminist rhetorics (TFR) for solidarity-building across multiple geo-political locations and sectors.
We argue that transnational feminism is both a discourse of critique and generative action: it mobilizes discourses, bodies, forces, and voices to preserve difference while establishing solidarities across geopolitical boundaries. We seek chapters that will highlight the day-to-day rhetorical praxis, literacies, and survival of people who work across varying geopolitical scales to challenge the specific and localized structural oppressions they face in their communities. And vice versa; we seek projects that identify deeply contextual rhetorical and activist strategies that contribute to the larger global forces of change with the end goal of pushing the boundaries of transnational feminist rhetorical scholarship.
It has been a decade since Rebecca Dingo, Rachel Riedner, and Jennifer Wingard published a cluster on Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in The Journal of Advanced Composition (2013). This interdisciplinary framework for analysis and praxis theorizes the multidirectional ways that power flows across geographic, political, and cultural boundaries (Desai; Grewal; Hesford; Kaplan; Mahmood; Mohanty; Schell; Spivak). This will be the first dedicated collection to place in conversation and theorize together the three interdisciplinary terms that define this subfield—transnational, feminist, rhetorical— to address the transnational gender, climate, and health crises of our contemporary world. While continuing to reject the homogenizing moves of “global” feminism that assumed white, Western feminists could speak for all women, this collection seeks to amplify the ongoing conversations about the politics of representation and recognition in transnational feminism and activism in the third decade of the twenty-first century. For example, we seek projects that identify and recognize the ways in which digital technologies have enabled and limited connections across geographic and cultural boundaries and reshaped or reinforced systems of gendered oppression. We argue that these new exigencies require new ways of (re)mobilizing solidarity in transnational feminist rhetorics.
Thus, this collection will continue the solidarity-building work of transnational feminist rhetorical scholars (see Chowdhury and Philipose) by looking back and building upon the cross-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary work of TFR as it intersects with human rights, disability studies, affect studies, queer and trans studies, digital humanities, new materialism, decoloniality, and studies of science and technology, health and medicine, etc. We invite projects from established and emerging scholars that foreground activism and narrate the localized and often invisible histories of movements, mobilizations, and gendered activism across the world.
Specifically, we seek projects that take up the following questions and issues through the lens of (re)mobilization:
Projects that amplify the voices and lives of women and gender non-conforming people, especially projects that theorize mobilization from embodied experiences.
Projects that make visible the stories, histories, and contexts surrounding or prefiguring activism and solidarity and/or that (re)theorize relationships between scholars and activists.
Projects that value grounded and decolonial epistemologies of resistance, intersectionality, and embodied experiences and knowledges of violence and solidarity.
Projects that theorize outside of traditional binaries (for example, victim/perpetrator; activist/scholar; East/West; subject/object; local/global; top down/bottom up; the gender binary).
Projects that examine transnational solidarities in light of contemporary exigencies and technological connectivities. What does transnational feminist solidarity-building look like across borders in the third decade of the twenty-first century and moving forward?
Projects that recognize and acknowledge the limitations and affordances of the shifting locations and politics from which we narrate, theorize, and mobilize.
Projects that cross various transnational scales, sectors, and “scapes” (see Appadurai) to show how a TFR lens is essential for mobilizing embodied change and feminist epistemologies in science and technology, health and medicine, climate justice, etc.
Estimated Timeline:
August 25th, 2023: Chapter proposals of 500 words and a short bio due. Please submit to: transnationalfeministrhetorics
September 15, 2023: Notifications/acceptances sent
January 30th, 2024: Complete chapters due
March 30th, 2024: Internal Reviews Due
July 15th, 2024: Revisions Due
August 1, 2024: Manuscript sent to publisher for external review. (We are currently in conversation with two interested publishers.)
Works Cited
Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theory, Culture, & Society, vol. 7, no. 2-3, 1990, pp. 295-310.
Chowdhury, Elora Halim and Liz Philipose. Dissident Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism, and Transnational Solidarity. U of Illinois P, 2016.
Desai, Manisha. “Critical Cartography, Theories, and Praxis of Transnational Feminisms.” The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements, edited by Rawwida Baksh and Wendy Harcourt, Oxford UP, 2015.
Dingo, Rebecca, Rachel Riedner, and Jennifer Wingard. “Toward a Cogent Analysis of Power: Transnational Rhetorical Studies.” JAC, vol. 33, no. 3–4, 2013, pp. 517–28.
Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham, Duke UP, 2005.
Hesford, Wendy. Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms. Duke UP, 2011.
Kaplan, Caren.“The Politics of Location as Transnational Feminist Critical Practice.” Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, edited by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, U of Minnesota P, 1994, pp. 137-152.
Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton UP, 2005.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Duke UP, 2003.
Schell, Eileen E. “Transnational Environmental Justice Rhetorics and the Green Belt Movement: Wangari Muta Maathai’s Ecological Rhetorics and Literacies.” JAC, vol. 33, no. 3-4, 2013, pp. 585-613.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, Columbia UP, 1994, pp. 66-111.