Call for Papers
N° 5 | 2017 – Feminisms in Revolution
Editors: Félix Boggio-Éwanjé, Morgane Mertueil, Matthieu Renault.
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Abstract
Feminism and revolution: juxtaposing the two terms seems to go without saying. Who could deny that feminism is indeed revolutionary? In the collective consciousness, whether in reference to specific historical sequences or in more general terms, feminism points to a radical transformation in, to start with, social, legal, and cultural relations. Yet, in research as well as in activism, feminism is rarely grasped in and through the angle of its own revolutionary vocation. We often prefer to think feminism with other struggles (feminism and class struggle, feminism and antiracism) and/or in relation to other forms of oppression (black feminism, intersectional feminism, postcolonial feminism). While highlighting the consubstantiality of modes of domination and resistance, this approach tends, however, to reduce the contribution of feminism to the domain of gender questions, rather than considering it as a transformative political movement in and by itself.
This issue of Comment s’en sortir ? proposes to put back on the agenda the ambition of revolutionary change embodied by feminism. For us, the analytical privilege of feminism is based on its power to reveal simultaneously the potentialities and the limits of revolutionary thought and process. We propose to no longer consider feminism as the section dedicated to “gender questions” in a larger emancipatory politics, or the “female version” of revolution, but to understand its necessary contribution to all revolutionary thought, to every attempt to disrupt the order of things. How does transforming the family, sexuality, organisation of social and biological reproduction, domestic or affective work, entail a revolution of the everyday life, of health, culture, wage labour, housing, collective life, industrial strategies, finances, and vice versa? In other terms, we are looking for contributions that envisage feminism as a constituting power, not as an amendment strategy of already constituted powers.
The issue deploys three lines of investigation: historical enquiries on the revolutionary forms of feminism and/or feminism in revolutionary contexts; analyses that geographically decenter and decolonize the revolutionary question starting with non-European feminisms; and, thirdly, time and space aside, the line of feminist utopias and uchronias.
THEMES
- Herstories/histories of revolutionary feminism
- Decolonizing Revolution, Decentering Feminism
- Feminist utopias-uchronias… and revolutionary melancholia
REFERENCES
BEBEL August, Women Under Socialism, New York, Schocken Books, 1975 [1879].
CHAKRABARTY Dipesh, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Differences, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000.
DAVISAngela, Women, Race and Class, New York, Random House, 1981.
DIRLIK Arif, The Origins of Chinese Communism, New York, Oxford University Press, 1989.
FEDERICI Silvia, Revolution at Point Zero. Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle, 2012.
GOLDMAN Wendy Z., Women, The State & Revolution. Soviet Family Policy & Social Life, 1917-1936, New York et Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
GUÉRINDaniel, Homosexualité et révolution, Paris, Spartacus, 2013 [1983].
KOLLONTAÏ Alexandra, Selected Writings (ed. Alix Holt), Westport, L. Hill, 1977.
MESTIRI Soumaya, Décoloniser le féminisme. Une approche transculturelle, Paris, Vrin, 2016.
TRAVERSO Enzo, Mélancolie de gauche. La force d’une tradition cachée, Paris, La Découverte, 2016.
WARSHOFSKY LAPIDUS Gail, Women in Soviet Society. Equality, Development, and Social Change, Berkeley, Los Angeles et Londres, University of California Press, 1978.
ZETKIN Clara, Letters and Writings, London, Merlin Press, 2015.
DATES LIMITES ET CONTACT
To propose an article, please submit an abstract up to 5 000 characters and, in a separate file, a presentation of the author, including your name(s), discipline, contact details and a short biography (up to 1 000 characters) to : .
- Submission of proposals: March 15th 2017
Acceptance decisions: April 1st 2017 - Submission of articles: June 1st 2017
- Publication : November 2017
Articles (anonymized files) should not exceed 40 000 characters (including, spaces, footnotes and references).
You can find our editorial charter here.