Special Issue of Feminist Teacher - Performance in the Feminist Classroom

deadline for submissions: 
April 1, 2018
full name / name of organization: 
H. Masturzo
contact email: 

Call for Proposals for a Special Issue of Feminist Teacher

Performance in the Feminist Classroom 

 

Editors:

Elizabeth Currans, Eastern Michigan University

Michelle Martin-Baron, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Holly Masturzo, Florida State College at Jacksonville

 

Call for Manuscript Proposals:

“Teaching is a performative act.  And it is that aspect of our work that offers the space for change, invention, spontaneous shifts, that can serve as a catalyst drawing out the unique elements of each classroom.  To embrace the performative aspect of teaching, we are compelled to engage ‘audiences,’ to consider issues of reciprocity.” bell hooks

 

At its core, feminist pedagogy recognizes that the classroom is a space of performance, where students and teachers often fall into, and reproduce, socially prescribed roles and power structures. That these roles replicate patriarchal order and privilege dominant epistemologies and ways of learning serves as an important locus for feminist intervention. Performance as a keyword and as a practice disrupts the “traditional” classroom and makes way for a wide variety of feminist approaches to challenging patriarchal culture. In these charged times, where our gender, racial, political, geographical, and other divisions can seem greater than our commonalities, performance also holds the promise of greater empathy, shared understanding, and human creativity. This special issue of Feminist Teacher aims to locate a variety of strategies, assignments, projects, and practices where feminist teachers from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds explicitly utilize performance as a technique for feminist praxis in the classroom. We’re interested in ways that both teachers and students become performers, as well as how and why teachers draw on performance as a way to achieve feminist pedagogical goals. In doing so, we hope to explore the relationship between feminism and performance, and to consider the unique contributions of performance to feminist pedagogy.

 

We seek to explore an array of practices across a wide-variety of feminist classrooms, including but not limited to high schools, community colleges, public and private institutions, research universities, and liberal arts colleges; from high school classrooms to large first-year, introductory lectures, senior seminars, and graduate colloquia. Essays might focus on but certainly are not limited to:

  • Dynamics of performance in the feminist classroom,
  • Syllabi and course construction around practices of performance and performance-based assignments,
  • Specific assignments or projects that are explicitly performative or performance based,
  • Performances of self and identity are utilized as pedagogical tools in the feminist classroom,
  • Performance arts in otherwise non-arts based feminist classrooms,
  • The ways that gender, race, sexuality, disability, and other identities are performed in classrooms,
  • The performative challenges of online teaching,
  • Surrealist approaches to pedagogy, joy, and play, 
  • The circumstances under which performance-based projects do and do not achieve our pedagogical goals, and
  • The unique contributions performance and performative pedagogy offer to the feminist classroom.

Submission Deadlines:

Deadline 500-word proposals: April 1, 2018

Feedback on proposals: May 12, 2018

Deadline for manuscripts of 6000-8000 words: July 21, 2018

Feedback to contributors: August 31, 2018

Deadline for revised manuscripts: Oct 21, 2018

Abstracts and manuscripts should follow Feminist Teacher submission guidelines (http://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/ft/ftsubmissions.html)

 

Proposals and manuscripts should be submitted to all three editors: Elizabeth Currans (ecurrans@emich.edu), Michelle Martin-Baron (mmartinbaron@hws.edu), and Holly Masturzo (h.masturzo@fscj.edu). 

 

About the Editors:

 

Elizabeth Currans is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Eastern Michigan University. Her book Marching Dykes, Liberated Sluts, and Concerned Mothers: Women Transform Public Space (University of Illinois Press, 2017) explores how participants in public demonstrations organized and attended primarily by women claim and remake public spaces. Recent publications appear in Feminist Formations, Social Justice, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Obsidian, Journal of Lesbian Studies, and Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies. Her new research examines performances (bicycle rides, protests, music festivals, performance art, sculpture parks) in edge spaces, sites where the urban and natural encounter each other. 

 

Michelle Martin-Baron is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She earned her PhD from UC Berkeley in Performance Studies with a designated emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her research examines public art, ritual, and performance practice in relation to national belonging. Her work has been published in E-mesphérica, Performing Ethos, Quarterly Horse, The International Journal of Feminist Politics, and the collection Queer Necropolitics (Routledge, 2015). She has an article forthcoming in Women and Performance.  

 

Holly Masturzo is Professor of Humanities at Florida State College at Jacksonville where she received the Outstanding Faculty Award in 2013. Her approaches to teaching are highlighted in the collections Third Mind: Creative Writing & Visual Art, The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing and Teaching with Fire: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Teach. A recipient of an Established Artist Fellowship from the Houston Arts Alliance, her creative work has appeared in Ars Medica: A Journal of Medicine, the Arts, and Humanities, Voices of Italian Americana, and at variety of performance venues. She alsoserves on the Board of Directors of Jacksonville Dance Theatre.