Adrienne Rich has written that her feminist politics entails “locating the grounds from which to speak with authority,” beginning “not with a continent or a house, but with the geography closest in–the body.”  Taking inspiration from Rich and foundational women of color feminists, this panel invites papers exploring the politics of position within the academy and scholars' embodiment in relation to our work. Though identity politics has been vilified since the culture wars of the 1990s, we recognize the value of “identity politics” as articulated by the Combahee River Collective; though they assert that “the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity,” an identity politics is inclusive and “makes us concerned with any situation that impinges upon the lives of women, Third World and working people.”

This panel understands Ethnic Studies as disciplines that originated out of identity-based social movements, and which have since cohered into academic fields of knowledge. Yet, who has historically been most encouraged to intervene in these fields? What considerations arise for scholars who work in fields that do not correspond with their own identities? How do we hold space for valuing embodied knowledge—what Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa have called “theory in the flesh”—while recognizing that intellectual inquiry in such fields is the work of everyone? By studying the relationship of embodiment to our scholarship, what can we glean about the politics of knowledge in the academy? This panel invites two genres of papers: autoethnography, and analyses of cultural texts that help us think about these questions.

If you are interested, please first get in touch with a brief email to let us know. You should send us abstracts and a bio by January 28th. Abstracts and bios should be a maximum of 500 and 350 words respectively.

Alex Ramos (anramos@uw.edu)
Smaran Dayal (sdayal@stevens.edu)