If women's studies (WS) can be described as occupying a space between precarity and legitimacy in the contemporary, corporate university, how do we experience, feel, and inhabit the discipline's in-between location? Institutional Feelings theorizes the contemporary institutional iterations of WS, with attention to the pressures, perils, pitfalls, politics, and potential pleasures of this partial institutionalization.
We particularly welcome innovative papers that theorize, engage, and/or capture an array of perspectives on the feelings that institutionalization can generate. We are invested in questions about the feelings that WS's partial institutionalization generates: What does the field's partial- institutionalization feel like for students, tenured and tenure track faculty, adjunct faculty, and administrators who labor in a field that has always had a fraught relationship with institutionalization? What are the feelings—pleasure, desire, optimism, melancholy, ordinariness, elation—that the discipline's partial institutionalization engenders? How does it feel to use a set of analytics – intersectionality, postcolonial, global, transnationalism, diversity, interdisciplinarity – that are increasingly celebrated, and, at times, mobilized by the corporate university?
Potential topics include:
• the transnational turn in feminist thought, and its relationship to the institutionalization and/or feminist knowledge making of WS
• the effects of transnational capitalism on the corporatization of the university, and/or vice-versa (for instance, how the rush to create overseas university depots of corporate influence will influence WS)
• the clash between the corporate university and progressive, anti-corporate feminist methodologies and ideas, and the effects that might have on internal and external funding, hiring, curriculum, and promotion and tenure
• comparative work on and/or histories of WS's institutionalization
• affects of institutionalization, which may include feeling WS in different institutional locations with varied resources and from different politics of location (research universities, community colleges, small liberal arts colleges, the politics of adjunct faculty)
• the racial politics involved with WS's institutionalization
• relationship between WS & diversity management efforts in the university
• institutionalization of core analytics within WS (e.g. intersectionality's institutionalization, transnationalism's institutionalization)
• the politics and process of administrating WS (graduate certificate programs, undergraduate minors, departmental status, doctoral programs, and the job market)
• How the discipline itself theorizes, analyzes, and negotiates its simultaneous marginalization and institutionalization

Deadline for full essays: October 1, 2014

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: Jennifer Nash (jennash@gwu.edu) and Emily Owens (eaowens@fas.harvard.edu).

Your submission should contain 3 attachments:
1) Cover page
2) Abstract and 6-9 keywords
3) Complete manuscript (with all identifying information removed)

Address questions to co-editors Jennifer Nash (jennash@gwu.edu) and Emily Owens (eaowens@fas.harvard.edu).

For information on Feminist Formations, visit our website. And for manuscript specifications, see Author Guidelines.