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CFP: Feminism and Failure (3/15/04; MLA '04)
A proposed special section for the 2004 MLA convention in Philadelphia,
27-30 December.
Feminism and Failure
What does feminism have to teach us about the standards and forms of
appearance by which "success" and "failure" are recognized, affirmed,
reevaluated? Often complicit with a rhetoric of immediacy that
measures success in terms of "real world" effects (successful
interventions, successful translations of theory into practice,
successful future-historical outcomes, etc.), is feminist criticism, by
the terms of its own desire to succeed, set up to fail? When success
is defined as acting upon a world beyond language, do denegations of
failure only and always point to the acute non-arrival and ongoing
impossibility of success? Similarly, if success is calculated in terms
of worldly change, how is feminist theory bound to remain enthralled to
oppositions between power and powerlessness, action and irrelevance,
importance and insignificance?
In order to examine the terms by which feminist theory has designated
the values of success and failure, this panel invites papers that take
up questions such as: How have feminist affirmations of the "new"
(broadly defined as the possibility of change, whether revolutionary
or incremental), insofar as they have sought to critique and displace
prior and current modes of oppression, set out to delineate the marks
of successful scholarship and the standards of feminist intellectual
work? How does feminist criticism redefine the standards by which the
success and failure of a work (a literary text, the work of art, acts
of reading, activist interventions, scholarly prose, etc.) are
evaluated? What counts (and fails to be counted) as activism? Is
there a feminist theory of change? of a call for change and of an
account for change? Rather than simply reversing the terms such that
failure becomes the measure of success, the panel hopes to investigate
issues including:
--debates about critical opacity and the "values of difficulty" (per
Judith Butler's recent essay and Martha Nussbaum's criticism of the
failures of obscurantism)
--feminism and affirmative teleology
--feminism, globalization, and the wages of success (who claims
successful feminist work? at what price? according to what standards?)
--feminism and the ethics of "help" (help as alibi for coercion; the
language of beneficence; feminism and the discourses of development)
--the (gendered) pathos of failure; failure and mourning; failure and
melancholia; the languages of loss
--feminism and futurity (utopian, dystopian, etc.)
--narrative and inconclusiveness
--gender and performance, speech act theory, the measures of successful
and/or failed performatives
--the rhetoric of blame, exoneration, and indifference
Please email abstracts (within body of email; no attachments, please)
by 15 March to: lecia.rosenthal@tufts.edu
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