Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society seeks submissions for a
special issue titled "Gender beyond 'Sexual Difference': Rethinking
Feminisms and Visual Culture," slated for publication in spring 2006. The
editors of this special issue seek manuscripts that offer new feminist
strategies for examining visual culture, convincing critiques of earlier
approaches to feminist visual analysis, and/or new models of feminist
visual theory that accommodate the multivalence of women's identities and
experiences. We are interested in essays that revise binary models of
sexual difference by considering the coextensivity of gender and the myriad
other aspects of identity (sexuality, race, ethnicity, etc.) defining
contemporary experience. This special issue of Signs will explore the
powerful political conflicts that inform the work of feminist visual
theorists and practitioners today and will place a particular emphasis on
the burdens and conflicts that fall on those whose work is simultaneously
feminist, antiracist, queer, postcolonial, Marxist, and so on.
This issue will include works that attempt to rethink the nexus of
feminisms (in the plural) and visual culture beyond the dualisms generally
posed by "sexual difference" theory, as important as this theory was in
developing critical models for analyzing the patriarchal structures of
visual representation in Euro-American cultures. Located at a moment of
intense shifts in conceptions and experiences of identity (national,
international, class, ethnic, racial, sexual, gender, and otherwise), this
issue intends to provide multiple points of view on the intersection of
feminism and visual culture, to pose new critical models of reading imagery
and/or interrogating how feminist visual theories and practices from the
so-called fine arts to television, performance art, and the Internet might
productively negotiate the increasingly complex pressures of global
capitalism. Possible topics could include:essays analyzing the productive
or destructive conflicts between specific feminist visual theories and
particular queer, antiracist, Marxist, postcolonial, and/or other theories
of identity; articles addressing key feminist works of art (e.g., Adrian
Piper's performances) through models of analysis acknowledging the
intersectionality of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality, and
so on; papers examining visual images or objects that articulate complex
formulations of gendered identity as multiple and unfixed; or essays
offering new feminist models of visual theory that accommodate the
interdependence of gender and other aspects of identity.
The special issue editors are Amelia Jones (history of art, School of Art
History and Archaeology, University of Manchester) and Jennifer Doyle
(English, University of California, Riverside). Please send submissions
(three copies) no later than August 1, 2004, to Signs, "Rethinking
Feminisms and Visual Culture," University of California, Los Angeles, 1400H
Public Policy Building, Box 957122, Los Angeles, CA 90095-7122. Please
observe the guidelines in the most recent issues of the journal or at
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/Signs/instruct.html.

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Received on Wed Jul 09 2003 - 22:09:34 EDT