CALL FOR ABSTRACTS : The Forgotten Foundations of Feminist Legal Scholarship, Part 2: 1985-1995 (London/Zoom, 4 November 2022) (DEADLINE: 16 October 2022)

 

(Source: Criticallegalthinking)

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