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)) the emphasis will be put instead on the term ‘new’; hence, this collection will aim mainly at bringing into the fore feminism’s internal movements, trajectories, lines of transformation, dynamics of change that bring it about as a feminism-in-becoming. A becoming that does not simply and linearly pass through the established periodisation of the feminist movement (first, second and third waves) but zigzags and experiments with the aim to introduce a new politics of an open futurity (and not that of predetermined political goals), as well as, new political agencies (and new voices) on both levels of thinking and acting.
The call for papers aims thus at contributions that will signal a radical break from a notion of feminism as being single, continuous with a clear agenda and a clear view of where we ‘should’ go and how we should move. It thus invites papers that will challenge and question views of feminism as a static methodology and of feminists as subjects of a certain kind, suggesting instead new feminist subjectivities that refuse to be discursively known so as to get re-cognition. Finally, it invites papers that will dare to ‘forget’ old vocabularies and will be willing to go through the risk and agony of thinking within new ones that replace strict notions of being with an experimental pragmatics of becoming. Such a new pragmatics is actualised through a different relating, a symbiotic relation with significant others-than-the-dominant-concept-of ‘WoMan’ — relations that in turn produce ethical ecologies of new connections, which no longer apply to the humanistic discourse of political identities/communities but to a new materialising language of enfleshed alterities, and non-binaristic differences.
Far from repeating/reproducing an oppositional, negative relation between “history/tradition” and “becoming/new,” this project wishes to reflect on and explore the very sustainability of a productive tension between the two. Hence, in speaking of novelty and change, it addresses a difficult yet interesting question: How can one bring it about positively, that is, in ways that free us from tradition without the means of negation (e.g. without repressing, forgetting, rejecting it)? This is a central issue specifically for feminism; hence, the persisting question around which the book will develop could be articulated as follows: How can we, as young women, upcoming scholars, ’new feminists‘, but also those more established among us, move beyond and be critical of those feminists preceding us, without repeating the patriarchal move of burying/forgetting not just tradition per se, but specifically a feminist tradition/legacy? This constitutes for us an infinitely difficult question, and one that this book wishes to reflect on and explore in subtle and interesting ways.
Far from being the product of a mere desire to shock or provoke, the product of a fetishistic obsession for the new, this collection comes to enhance and increase new voices within feminism that aim at de-territorialising feminism on both levels of practice and thinking—which means to remove it from the constants that define its formal operations and reproduce its authority. The plurality of the editorial voice(s) reflects the desire for a community-in-writing that resists institutionalisation and segregation, a desire for a writing-together-in-difference not under a common identity, but after common passions.

The book will invite papers on the following themes:

• New Feminist Epistemologies and Methodologies: Moving away from the dominance of discourse and social constructivism?
• From Inter-sectional to Trans-sectional Thinking: New feminist approaches to class, race, sexuality, ethnicity, globalization, and generation.
• New Feminist Languages: Challenging academic writing and thinking with new writing practices.
• New Feminist Aesthetics.
• Bringing Activism into Thinking: The relationship between academic and activist discourses (theory and practice).
• Space and Time: Exploring the relationship between corporeality and temporality, materialism and change, memory/forgetfulness and ethics.
• New Feminisms: A post-human feminism?

The deadline for submitting proposals is July 15, 2008.
Proposals should be 300-500 words in length and sent in Word format to newfeminisms#gmail.com. Please include a brief bio with your proposal.

Editors’ Biographical Notes:
Henriette Gunkel was awarded a PhD in 2007 at the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London, UK. She is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Fort Hare Institute for Social and Economic Research in East London, South Africa. She is currently writing a book on the cultural politics of female same-sex intimacy in post-apartheid South Africa. She is the co-editor of darkmatter’s third themed issue on the subject of postcolonial sexuality. Broader academic interests centre on the politics of race and racism, postcolonial theory, queer theory and feminist theories of the body.
Chrysanthi Nigianni has recently joined the thinking-machine of a neo-materialist feminism. Educated in the social sciences—she holds a sociology degree from Panteion University (Athens), and an MSc in Sociology from the London School of Economics (LSE)—she then took the turn to philosophy and feminism with the focus being on queer theory, theories of sexuality and continental philosophy. She is a PhD candidate at the University of East London. She has taught at the University of East London (London) and at Anglia Ruskin University (UK). She is co-editor of the book Deleuze and Queer Theory, published by Edinburgh University Press (to the press), and of the New Formations issue on ‘Deleuze and Politics’.
Grace Spinazzi holds a degree in Philosophy (thesis on the political-social aspects of Luce Irigaray’s work) and is specializing in inter-culturality and social citizenship at University Ca’Foscari (Venice, Italy). She co-organized the conference “Re-thinking Democracy” with Luce Irigaray in Venice, Italy (2005). She is an active member of the “Open Seminar of Philosophy in Practice,” founded by Luigi Tarca (University of Venice) and Romano Madera (University Bicocca of Milan). She is the founder and an active member of the non-profit association “Libera Associazione di Idea” (social-educational-philosophical association), as well as an active member of the “Female Citizens Council,” which is part of the Venice Council. She works with rescued women and their children, teaches Philosophy in the male prison of Venice, collaborates with University Ca’Foscary, different high schoolsin Venice, and with The Equal Opportunities Councillor’s Office on gender and women’s studies and political social projects.
Fanny Söderbäck received her MA in Comparative Literature from South Stockholm University College (Sweden) in 2003. She is currently working on a PhD in Philosophy at The New School for Social Research (USA), writing a dissertation on ethics and temporality in the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, and is teaching Philosophy at Eugene Lang College. Her academic background is in Comparative Literature, Gender Studies and Creative Writing. She has lived in France, where she studied French language and culture, and has worked as a freelance journalist since 1998, covering culture and arts for several newspapers and magazines. She has collaborated with French and Swedish visual artists, created cultural festivals, and organized conferences and seminars. She is currently editing a volume of feminist interpretations of the Antigone, forthcoming with SUNY Press.

aus: http://www.gendercampus.ch