Our CFP reopens formational questions of the feminist movement in the face of the environmental crisis.

Feminist Working Group

IFTR 2020

Call for Papers

Feminist Ecologies / Ecologies of Feminism

 

At our meeting in Shanghai in 2019, we engaged with some of Val Plumwood’s work with Denise Varney, exploring her detailed and clear analysis of the relationships between gender politics, feminism, and environmentalism. As this debate becomes increasingly urgent we return to investigate it further in 2020, at the IFTR Galway conference ‘Theatre Ecologies: Environment, Sustainability, and Politics’.

 

Our CFP has also been partially inspired by Judith Butler’s essay Antigone’s Claim (2000), which asks if Antigone can ‘work a counterfigure to the trend championed by recent feminists to seek the backing and authority of the state to implement feminist policy aims’. These ancient tragedies continue to be widely produced and performed in new translations and adaptations, as commentaries and responses to cultural, political, and military events and crises. Antigone’s Claim interrogates formational questions of the feminist movement – of the nature of the individual subject; of agency; of the relationship to the state, the family, and the personal to the political. These issues might usefully be reopened at this point where the environmental crisis imminently threatens the continued existence of states and nation states, and established systems of working, living, and being on the planet.

 

We welcome papers papers on a range of topics, including:

·      How can feminism(s) and feminist performance practices respond to the spectre of mass extinction and the crises of climate change?

·      Given the varied impact of climate change in different regions of the world, and its inextricability from poverty and famine, can feminism position itself outside its popular association with racial and economic privilege?

·      Can the backing and authority of the state be used to further feminist aims? Or is feminism still necessarily engaged with the process of dismantling the state and its apparatuses? How might theatre and performance become tools for these political processes?

·      What form might feminist ecologies of the state, the academy, the family, or the community (variously defined)?

·      What are the responsibilities and the opportunities for a specifically feminist response to the climate emergency?

·      How successful has theatre been (in various parts of the world) in exploring the intersection between hyper-globalisation policies that manifest both in patriarchal structures of the community and gendered roles ascribed to women?

·      Can feminism(s) and feminist performance practice also serve as a platform for addressing the international disparity between the Global North and Global South in terms of climate policies and resource consumption?

 

 

Abstracts for the Feminist Research Working Group should be submitted through the Cambridge Journals Online pages by 31 January, 2020. For more information on this process, go to: https://www.iftr.org/conference/abstract-submission

We are happy to consider feminist papers that respond more broadly to the conference theme. 

 

Please direct any questions you may have about the conference to iftrgalway2020@gmail.com

 

Our Process

The Feminist Research Working Group is composed of scholars from Sweden, India, Pakistan, Slovenia, Britain, China, Japan, South Korea, Chile, Spain, Germany, Brazil, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and the United States. It works by circulating papers to members in advance of the conference. Those who have circulated papers are invited to speak for no more than five minutes, followed by fifteen minutes of responses and discussion by the whole group, who will have read the papers in advance. The twenty-minute presentation and response format is structured to encourage cross-cultural exchange and we emphasize constructive participation, debate and feedback among our members.

 

The full text of the selected papers (no more than 3000 words) should be emailed to the conveners by for uploading into the group's Dropbox by 8 June 2020. For further information please do not hesitate to contact the conveners. You are reminded that in order to present your paper it is necessary to formally submit your abstract according to the guidelines on the conference website, register for the conference and to become a member of IFTR.

You are also reminded that papers can be given to the working group or within the main conference, but you may not do both.

 

Convenors:

Dr Lisa Fitzpatrick, University of Ulster: l.fitzpatrick@ulster.ac.uk

Indu Jain, Janki Devi Memorial College, Delhi University : indujain81@gmail.com