Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Web); Guest editors: Sarah Haley (UCLA), Carla Kaplan (Northeastern), and Durba Mitra (Harvard)

Proposals by: 15.09.2019

Feminists are raging. This special issue will consider our rage as a global, complex phenomenon that mandates interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis. Rage is historical. Rage can be deeply exclusionary, recognizable as a legitimate emotion for only a privileged few. It is an instrument of patriarchy as well as a potential feminist resource. Rage shapes moral claims for racial justice, movements against gender violence, and opposition to the global rise of authoritarian regimes. Rage can do so in ways that both extend and depart from the histories of feminist and queer raging that marked late-twentieth-century radical feminism, global organizing against HIV/AIDS, and against police brutality. Rage is embedded in the fabric of institutions, in public policy, and in conservative rhetoric. It animates white supremacist and patriarchal violence as well as feminist resistance.
Women’s rage has historically been medicalized, pathologized, and perceived as antinormative and antisocial. Yet rage also marks transgressive arenas such as black feminist culture, thought, and politics. Black feminist theory has offered critical insights on rage’s eloquence, uses, and violent racialization, while public figures such as Serena Williams force us to grapple with rage as public refusal, as well as a labor resource and commodified affect. This special issue seeks to further explore rage as a conundrum, or double agent, operating both for and against feminism: visceral, transgressive, galvanizing, and socially constructed.

The deadline for submissions is September 15, 2019.

The Volume is slated for publication in the summer of 2021.

The full call for papers and submission instructions are available here.

Source: H-Net Notifications