The deadline for submitting proposals is July 15, 2008.

This book aims at creating an experimental space for new voices, thinkings and practices of feminism to be articulated — the ‘new’ entailing the capacity to move away from (though not necessarily reject) the ‘past’ of feminism as a moral, interpretative body of knowledge and experience, in an attempt not to dismiss the latter per se, but its status and workings as a prior enunciation, a savoir that engenders present and future imperatives to feminist thinking and practice. While showing respect to a feminist past (to which new feminism is perceived to be tied immanently), this collection will, at the same time, take a necessary and unavoidable distance from it, in the sense that this past of feminism has not been experienced in its actuality as a lived reality by the new generations of feminists. Thus, ‘new feminisms’ oppose becoming to (linear) history and seek to articulate new realities through the production of new discourses and thinking frameworks that express an inter-generational feminist relationality differently: A connection to the past, as we have inherited it through language, and a belief in the present through the activism of writing and acting.
Rather than approaching today’s feminism(s) exclusively through the lenses of an established, recognised past (a reflecting back on feminist histories that inform the present of feminism(s) and question its future(s) Continue reading →

Guest Editor: Anastasia Valassopoulos (University of Manchester)

Feminist Theory calls for papers for a special issue on Arab feminisms and Arab feminist theory today. The special issue (to be published in 2010) will speak to transcultural concerns and seeks to make explicit reference to the place of Arab feminism and Arab feminist thought within the broader spectrum of current western and postcolonial feminism.

Essays are invited that will focus on updating the parameters of an Arab feminism, namely, on foregrounding the issues that are today being discussed, theorised and implemented. Taking as a given the complexities inherent in a broad topic such as Arab feminism, where objectives shift continuously, the special issue does not aim to provide a history of Arab feminism, nor to present conclusive statements on its formation but rather, to make visible the rich and constructive work taking place within the field. The issue seeks to focus explicitly on recent endeavours/projects that have focussed on women’s lives and cultural production in the Arab world and its Diaspora, understood in explicit feminist terms as well as the constructive theorisation that arises from these very endeavours. Continue reading →