Via Criticallegalthinking,
we learned of this call for paper proposals.
Contemporary feminist legal scholarship appears
to have no history and almost no canonical texts. Unlike other fields in the
humanities and social sciences, there has been an absence of interest in
questions of feminist inheritance in law; a certain unwillingness to grapple
with feminism’s intellectual and/or textual traditions. Individual studies,
however radical or sophisticated in their orientation, appear to be situated in
the ‘feminist present’ only, such that the past of legal feminism is void of any
heritage worthy of being handed down.
Yet despite this disregard or disavowal,
contemporary feminist legal scholarship rests on the foundations of a corpus of
post-war feminist texts. Those texts’ vital power shaped new, creative, and
critical modes of thinking, new routes for understanding and reflection that
challenged dominant thought inside and outside the academy. They animated
multiple ways of revalorising lived experience and the subject’s embodied
nature and in so doing raised radical questions about women’s social being. It
is the forgetfulness of these earlier texts that these workshops wish to
interrogate. The first workshop, held in Summer 2022, focused on feminist
theoretical texts produced (mainly) in the years between 1970-1985. The second
workshop, to be held in Autumn 2022, will focus on the body of new feminist,
feminist legal, critical race feminist, postcolonial feminist and queer legal
scholarship that emerged from the mid-1980s to early 1990s.
In these two one-day workshops we wish to pose
as a problem the present of feminist legal scholarship that has not only lost
sight of most of these earlier texts, but has left this disconnection from its
past to go entirely unnoticed. It is as if what credits feminist legal
scholarship with contemporaneity is precisely the erasure of these earlier
texts from its horizon. The questions to be addressed include: what is the
position of these texts with regards to the present? How should we think of the
feminist (legal) texts of the 1970s-90s today? How should we place our
contemporary thought in relation to those texts? How are we to
receive these texts today? Why is it that feminist legal scholarship has
developed no feminist canon or classical literature while continuing to
reference/reverence the work of white male philosophers? In short, are we to
reconnect and reconcile with the rich inheritance that feminist thought and
practice of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s has bequeathed us? Or should we continue to
acknowledge as a sign of our contemporaneity the disjunction with our
heritage?
Call for Paper Proposals
Please send proposals of papers for the second
workshop to Maria Drakopoulou (m.drakopoulou@kent.ac.uk) and/or Rosemary Hunter (r.c.hunter@kent.ac.uk). Proposals, including title and abstract of 150-300 words, should be
submitted by 16 October 2022.
An indicative list of texts is attached
although texts outside this list with justifications for inclusion are welcome.
Limited funding for travel costs may be
available for research students and early career researchers. If you would need
funding in order to attend, please let us know, with approximate cost, as soon
as possible.
Workshop Organisers: Maria Drakopoulou and Rosemary
Hunter.
Place: London in person + online for participants
unable to travel
Date: 4 November 2022
No comments:
Post a Comment