Call for Papers! Feminism, Antifeminism, and the Mobilization of Regret! Deadline for submissions: May 1, 2025!
Possible areas of focus might include:
- How is regret, as affect and as political discourse, constructed in relation to gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality, and history? Whose harms are considered regrettable, and whose are merely collateral damage?
- How do regressive cultural phenomena such as “gender-critical” discourse; crusades against diversity, equity, and belonging initiatives; book banning; or “incel” culture position the loss of white, heterosexual, cisgender hegemony as regrettable? How can feminist action and discourse counter such framings?
- Some feminist and antiracist social media movements, such as #MeToo/#BalanceTonPorc/#YoTambien, #ShoutYourAbortion, or #BlackLivesMatter, resist social discourses that cast violent harm as a result of regrettable individual actions (such as what someone was wearing or where they were walking). Such movements resist regret and transform silence into speech; are they successful in dismantling power structures?
- Regret may stem from conflict within feminist movements. For example, regret may result in or from efforts to “call in” or “call out” negative behavior in our classrooms, communities, and online spaces. Must such regret end in irresolvable conflict, or can it produce new coalitions?
- Setbacks in progress toward political goals—for example, the overturning of Roe v. Wade—may lead to regret for past strategic choices. Such regret has the potential to cause paralysis or apathy; can it instead embolden us to develop new and more effective strategies?
- The social, political, and economic conditions of late capitalism around the world—such as lack of childcare, eldercare, healthcare, and housing—force impossible “choices” in relation to parenting, intimate relations, and work and create the conditions for regret. Nationalist ideologies of gender and family recast such constraints as “natural” and necessary. How can feminists counter such constraints and distortions?
- In “From a Survivor,” Adrienne Rich writes regretfully of her marriage and her husband’s suicide, “I don’t know who we thought we were / that our personalities/ could resist the failures of the race. . . . / Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special.” Where and how do regret and its related affects (shame, grief, loss, nostalgia) appear in or structure feminist art and literature?
The deadline for submissions is May 1, 2025. Laura Green (Northeastern University) and Chris Bobel (University of Massachusetts Boston) will serve as guest editors. Manuscripts should be submitted electronically
For more details, refer here
