[Badgirlz-list] CFP: Special Issue of Gender and Society

> with respect to feminist considerations of gender
> and sexual politics of
> states/nations.
> We initiate this special issue to invite feminist
> scholars to reconsider
> the sexual and
> gendered politics of states/nations and to
> critically analyze how states
> wield and realign
> their power. We are especially interested in
> articles that are
> empirically based while
> deepening and diversifying our theories of gender,
> sexuality, state, and
> nation. We encourage
> authors to broaden our understanding of the nuances,
> tensions,
> contradictions, and
> inconsistencies of state power and cultural and
> political nationalisms
> in relation to regional
> and transnational social, economic, and political
> processes.
> Secondly, we seek to identify a critical feminist
> alternative to the
> predominant domestic
> versus globalization analyses of gender and
> sexuality. For this, we call
> for unsettling
> divisions between disciplines and methodologies. We
> solicit analyses of
> the interplay between
> gender, sexuality, nation, and state that are
> contextualized in cultural
> and spatial (or
> geographical) crossings, so that their linkages are
> re-theorized and
> reflected upon in new
> ways. Our emphasis is on establishing and
> challenging links between
> power inequalities from the
> vantage point of marginalized groups and their
> changing relations to the
> state/nation in
> different cultural and geographical settings.
> Thirdly, our purpose is to encourage transnational
> dialogues between
> feminists. Thus far, U.S.
> feminist scholarship has not sufficiently engaged
> with research on
> gender and sexuality
> produced by non-Anglo European scholars. Aside from
> the obvious problems
> of not taking
> seriously other cultural and geographical contexts
> into consideration,
> this neglect has also
> resulted in an impoverishment of theoretical
> insights on issues of
> gender and sexuality within
> the U.S. We think such dialogues could be fruitful
> not only within the
> U.S. but also for a wide
> range of feminists concerned about the gendered and
> sexual politics of
> states and nations. This
> issue intends to initiate a platform for dialogue
> among feminist
> scholars working in Africa,
> Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and
> North America so that
> we may collaboratively
> respond to the problems, limits, contradictions, and
> possibilities
> forged by (trans)national
> socio-economic, cultural and state structures.
> Toward that end, this special issue on transnational
> feminist analyses
> of gender, sexuality,
> and state/nation would highlight the following
> theoretical questions:
> 1.      How do critical feminists understand and
> theorize key aspects of
> nations and states in
> a transnational context—for example, struggles
> around citizenship,
> fundamentalist movements,
> rights language, war, violence, civil liberties,
> ethnicities, sexual
> minorities, racial
> politics, and social identities?
> 2.      How do we encourage critical feminist
> contributions that move us
> away from monolithic,
> Euro-American centered conceptions of state, nation,
> gender, and
> sexuality toward culturally
> situated, pluralistic understandings of these
> categories?
> 3.      What kinds of feminist dialogues on aspects
> of gender,
> sexuality, nation, or state are
> necessary and need to be fostered across cultural
> and geographical
> borders?
> 4.      How do we rethink key aspects of the
> concepts of gender and
> sexuality away from
> primarily textual discursive methodologies and,
> instead, ground them in
> political economic,
> cultural, and spatial contexts of state power?

> These questions serve as a statement of our field of
> interest and are
> not prescriptive.  We
> hope that these questions can generate submissions
> that address the
> following and related
> issues:
> ·       Creative rethinking and reconsideration of
> the state and its
> changing role in the
> regulation of gendered and racial citizenship,
> sexual orientations,
> ethnic communities, and
> social identities, in various spatial and cultural
> contexts.
> ·       Research on expressions of desire, meanings
> of sexual
> identities, or sexual politics
> that locate these concerns at the cross-sections of
> state structures,
> cultural and political
> nationalisms, or transnational circuits.
> ·       Analyses of (neo)nationalisms and how they
> shape, control,
> define and limit genders,
> sexualities, classes, and ethnic and racial groups.
> ·       New understandings of the rise of national,
> religious, and
> secular fundamentalisms and
> their impact on, or relations to, gender, sexual,
> ethnic, and racial
> subjectivities.
> ·       Studies on the formation of gendered,
> sexual, racial, class,
> ethnic, and national
> identities in alternative modernities and the role
> of political
> economy—for example, the
> Caribbean, China, Vietnam, India, the Philippines,
> and South Africa.
> ·       Conceptual and methodological
> considerations of the limits, or
> the significance, of
> globalization, local-global, inter-national, and
> nationalist approaches
> to gender and
> sexuality.
> ·       New approaches to analyzing genders and
> sexualities within the
> contexts of
> transnational resistance, social movements,
> globalization processes, and
> “rights” discourses
> and politics.
> ·       Analyses of neo-colonial and neo-liberal
> policies and practices
> of the state/nation,
> the realignment of state power, and their
> implications on genders and
> sexualities.
> ·       Analyses of gender and sexuality in ethnic
> conflicts, wars of
> partition, political
> violence, neo-imperial dominance, and “war on
> terrorism.”