Call for Papers (01/15/15)
Mobilizing Vulnerability:
New Directions in Transnational Feminist Studies and Human Rights
A Special Issue of Feminist
Formations
Co-edited by Wendy
S. Hesford and Rachel Lewis
During the past
decade, there has been a substantial growth in academic scholarship devoted to
exploring the intersections among vulnerability, precarity, and human rights.
While feminist and queer theorists have turned toward concepts of vulnerability
and precarity as a way of accounting for contemporary forms of political
violence, critical theorists have turned to
vulnerability and affiliated terms (precarity and precarization, for example)
as the basis for understanding human interdependencies, obligations, and
ethical responsibilities (Berlant, Butler, Cvejić, Fineman, Lorey, Puar, and
Vujanović). However, what
has not been considered to date and what this special issue aims to elucidate
are the contributions that transnational feminist scholarship and methods can
make toward our understanding of embodied and structural vulnerabilities,
especially as these vulnerabilities shape human rights theory and practices.
This
special issue will discuss both the value and the risks of theories of
vulnerability and precarity for transnational feminist research on human
rights. Specifically,
we seek to address how transnational feminist analytics might increase our
understanding of the mobilization of vulnerability and how concepts of
vulnerability and precarity travel transnationally to produce new
rationalities. We seek contributions that focus particular attention upon the
intersection of notions of vulnerability and precarity with human rights
discourses, with an emphasis on how these concepts might advance or counter
transnational feminist projects. A key issue will be the ways in which such
discourses typically map vulnerability onto certain bodies (marked in terms of
gender, race, class, or age) and not others, and how these bodies take on the
burden of representation in domestic and international politics and law.
As such, we invite article submissions on any topic
pertaining to the subject of global human rights, sexuality, disability, and
emergent work in vulnerability studies. Key
questions framing the special issue include the following:
1.
To what extent has the growing inclusion of women’s rights, LGBT
rights, disability rights, and children’s rights on the international human
rights agenda opened up a space for alternative conceptualizations of vulnerability
and human rights discourses? How do marginalized subjects perform resistance
through the mobilization of vulnerability and precarity?
2.
How
might theories of vulnerability and precarity challenge second wave feminist
understandings of women’s human rights grounded in freedom from gender violence
and the pursuit of sexual autonomy? What role might transnational feminisms
play in further elucidating the potential and limitations of vulnerability as
an analytic?
3. How do advocacy
groups navigate the international moral economy of human rights and unsettle
moral dichotomies (victim/agent) as they take on shifting identities and
positions in narrating their struggle for power within their multifaceted
particularities?
4. How
might transnational feminist and queer theories of vulnerability and precarity help scholars,
practitioners, policy-makers and human rights advocates to better account for
the pleasures and vicissitudes of desire and relationality, emotion and affect,
corporeality and interdependency, care and protection in human rights
narratives?
5. In
what ways might theories of vulnerability and precarity establish new critical
frameworks for rethinking the contested relationship between women of color
feminisms and transnational feminist practices?
We especially invite
contributions that explore the intersections among vulnerability, precarity and
human rights in relation to the following thematics:
·
the role of vulnerability and precarity within transnational
feminist theory and activism
·
differential distributions of vulnerability and precarity along
the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and citizenship
·
the
potential and limitations of theories of vulnerability and precarity for
thinking through race, gender, sexuality and the formation of international
human rights discourses
·
racism and state violence
·
trauma and the ethics of witnessing
·
dispossession, ecstasy and the limits of sexual autonomy
·
disability and displacement
·
interracial vulnerability and economic precarity
·
love and gender violence
·
sexual rights and erotic vulnerability
·
precarity and gender norms
We seek
contributions from across the humanities and social sciences that interrogate
representations of gender, sexuality, disability, human rights, and
vulnerability in relation to law and public policy, social media, literature,
narrative, popular culture, and social justice activism. We welcome
contributions with U.S., global, international, and transnational foci.
Essays should be 8k -11k words, including endnotes and references.
Submit your complete manuscript via email to FF editorial assistant, Brooke
Lober (
feministformations@email.arizona.edu)
and copy the co-editors to your email: Wendy Hesford (hesford.1@osu.edu) and
Rachel Lewis (
rlewis13@gmu.edu).
For information on
Feminist
Formations, visit our
website.
And for further manuscript
specifications, see
Author
Guidelines. For all other questions, please contact the special issue guest
editors.