Centre for Feminist Research at York Univ., Toronto (Web)
Time: 16.-18.08.2024
Venue: virtual space – via Toronto
Proposals by: 22.03.2024
The Centre for Feminist Research at York Univ. invites abstracts from scholars, researchers, activists, and artists for the fourth annual Critical Femininities Conference on the theme of Generation. To generate is to cause, create, or bring about. A generation may refer to a relation in time or the creation of art, scholarship, solidarity, or power. This conference aims to explore the multifaceted dimensions of and attitudes towards femininity across different generations, interrogating how various social, cultural, political, and technological factors intersect with and shape our experiences. In this moment of intergenerational conflicts, climate crisis, and generative AI, the time has come to think critically about our generations and what we generate.
Critical femininities as a discipline and praxis rethinks feminine embodiment under heteropatriarchy and provides an entry point to reclaiming femmeness as an intersectional, complex and generative subjectivity (McCann 2018; Hoskin and Blair 2022; Taylor and Hoskin 2023). The generative aspect of femininity reveals the multidimensional modes of resistance and power that arise in taking up femme identity. Femme and femininity hold generative potentials that are not restrained to regulatory discourses of lack, shame, or failure. In rethinking femininities and generation, we harken the affective aspects of femme-becomings, accounting for the creative energy that comes with „what a femme body does,“ rather than the notion of „what a femme body can do“ we have adhered to under systems of oppression (McCann 2018, 118). An affective perspective on femme embodiment and generations offers radical possibilities for femme to be experienced and lived through messy, artful and bodily practices (Athelstan 2015; Kafai 2021; Schwartz 2018).
Feminism has often been chronicled throughout history as a series of generational waves, each with its own distinct approach to gendered issues and its own understanding of femininity (Hemmings 2011; Rampton 2015). While this wave framing has been critiqued as exclusionary of Black feminists and other marginalized groups Continue reading