EDITOR: MARY F. BREWER
University College Worcester

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTORS

LEARNING TO DANCE AS SISTERS:
TOWARD A FEMINIST HOUSE OF DIFFERENCE

This is a call for proposals or completed papers that explore problems of
exclusion in feminist discourse and practice. I am putting together a
collection of essays that aims to interrogate the socio-political factors
that produce the power divisions between women of different racial/ethnic,
class, and subcultural groups. By interrogating oppositional feminist
discourses, it seeks to lay the groundwork for more progressive feminist
theories that may provide strategies for de-normalizing dominant
categories. The genesis of this collection lies in the belief that where
women locate themselves for resistance remains a critical question for a
women's movement, and only a feminism that emerges from the plurality of
feminine genders extant in society can form the basis for a theory and a
politics of social change. I would like the collection to be as
comprehensive as possible. Essays that combine a close examination of a
selection of cultural representations of femininity (e.g. from critical
theory/philosophy, literature, theatre, film, cybertexts, feminist
sociology/psychology) and feminist practices with a focus on women's lived
experience are particularly welcome.

Papers might, for example, address:

Ø how feminist theory supports the sameness/difference dichotomy by
positioning all women against the difference of masculinity, which results
in room being made for some women in pre-existing cultural and economic
structures and the maintenance of existing power relations among white,
middle-class, heterosexual women, and lesbians, working-class women, and
women of colour;
Ø how/why feminist constructions of femininity continue to reflect and
reinscribe dominant racial and sexual biases and consequently, feminist
theories of gender treat blackness and lesbianism as always already issues
of 'other-ness' to whiteness and heterosexuality;
Ø systematic alternatives to prevailing ways of interpreting the
materiality of gender(s), for example, by theorizing the materiality of
white and heterosexual gender constructs, but, while acknowledging
whiteness and heterosexuality as the objects of interrogation, avoiding the
danger of reinscribing a white, heterosexual centre;
Ø strategies for transforming power relations so that all women may be
afforded access to the discourse of subjecthood, without erasing,
universalizing, or otherwise leveling the different ethnic, class, and
sexual categories across which women are defined.

Papers previously published or under consideration for publication
elsewhere will be considered but must be so identified when submitted.
Please send abstracts/papers and a brief academic c.v. to:
m.brewer_at_worc.ac.uk or mary_at_babygenghis.freeserve.co.uk

If you prefer snail-mail:
Dr. Mary Brewer
Department of English and Drama
University College Worcester
Henwick Grove
Worcester WR2 6AJ
UK
Fax: 011-44-1905-855132

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Jennifer Lutzenberger
English Department
box 6000
SUNY Binghamton
Binghamton NY 13902-6000
e-mail: br00855_at_binghamton.edu
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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Received on Fri Sep 17 1999 - 14:15:06 EDT