Feminist Revolutions: Literature, History, Fine Arts, Cultural Studies, 1870-1970

deadline for submissions: 
July 31, 2019
full name / name of organization: 
Feminist inter/Modernist Association

The Feminist inter/Modernist Association invites paper, panel, and roundtable proposals on topics related to work by and/or about women, gender, and sexuality for our second interdisciplinary conference. Feminist Revolutions is open to a wide range of inquiries from various disciplinary perspectives—art history; race and gender; media and cultural studies; archival studies; digital humanities; literature; and history.

The inter/Modernist period was a time of sweeping feminist revolution, from political revolutions such as suffrage to cultural, artistic, and social revolutions in the U.S., U.K. and worldwide. Our theme of “revolutions” invokes revolutions variously and literally, but also addresses the cycles and circles in feminist thought and practice.  

Because the conference coincides with the centenary of the passage of the 19th Amendment in the United States, we invite papers, panels, and roundtables for a thematic track that critically examines a wide range of issues and concerns associated with the 19th Amendment and its legacy. (See Suggested Topics on Suffrage below.) Histories of suffrage have generally privileged white affluent women, but this conference takes as its starting point the knowledge that all classes, races, and genders labored for the cause. In engaging with a fraught and long history of the fight for suffrage not only in the United States, but worldwide, we hope to complicate our understanding of the multiple narratives that are (or should be) attached to this revolutionary time and beyond. We encourage both scholarly and pedagogical approaches.

Suggested Topics:

  • Politics, Activism, Organization, Legislature  
  • Literary, Artistic, and Cultural Forms
  • Archiving women/women as archivists
  • History
  • Embodiment/Corporeality (health, reproduction, contraception, surveillance, dis/ability, technology, pleasure)
  • Publishing (newspapers, little magazines, pamphlets, books)
  • Performance (dance, drama, poetry reading, pageantry, street performance, vaudeville)
  • Women in sport (tennis, cycling, mountaineering)
  • Media (photography, film, radio, documentary, visual and plastic arts)
  • Girl Power
  • Ecology
  • Collaborations (friendships, alliances, organizations)
  • Disability (rights, representations)
  • LBTGQ (rights, representations, definitions of)
  • Race (rights, representations, definitions of)
  • Women’s Innovations in Science, Medicine, and Industry
  • Globalization

Suggested Topics on Suffrage and Other Revolutions:

  • The various forms of feminist revolution that contributed to the passage of the 19th Amendment
  • The work of the early 20th century suffragists in shaping the work of second wave feminism and the Civil Rights movement
  • The indispensable roles women of color have played in the history of women’s rights and the subsequent historical erasure of their contributions
  • Women activists building revolutionary alliances across race and class differences
  • Tensions between the ideology of revolution and the practice of revolution
  • Global responses and contributions of working class women to suffrage
  • Archiving suffrage activism
  • Cultural, literary, and artistic representations of suffrage
  • Women in other revolutions (the Russian revolution, workers’ rights, socialist, communist)
  • Women’s liberation movements around the globe

Submit proposals of approximately 200 words for individual papers, 500 words for panels and roundtables by July 25, 2019 to feministintermodernist@gmail.com.