CALL FOR PROPOSALS 

 

“Feminist Provocations”

Feminist inter/Modernist Association

 

 

University of Mississippi, Oxford

May 16-18, 2024

 

The 2024 conference of the Feminist inter/Modernist Association (FiMA) celebrates and problematizes modernism as a cultural provocation. At times obnoxious and difficult, erudite and primitive, modernist art works and cultural forms are nothing if not provoking in their apparently cavalier dismissal of conventional aesthetic, sexual, and cultural standards. This trolling of conventional middle-class patrons of the arts extended to conspicuous violations of gender and sexual norms, from Josephine Baker’s cabaret performances to the gender-bending Eton cut that Laura Doan details in Fashioning Sapphism to the performative fashion and art of provocateurs like the Baroness Elsa von Freitag-Loringhoven, Katherine Dunham, Claude Cahun, and Marcel Moore. The sexual liberation claimed by writers like Djuna Barnes and Radcliffe Hall, and the calling out of racism and colonialism by writers like Una Marson, Jean Rhys, and Rebecca West, also provoked and unsettled the patriarchal and imperial establishment, some well into the postwar years.

 

We invite explorations of feminist modernism’s many provocations across poetry, fiction, drama, periodicals, music, art, photography, craft, performance, fashion, and dance. We encourage feminist examinations of little magazines, slick magazines, independent presses, and transnational networks and circulations. We seek reconsiderations of the feminist uses of space and place inside and out of established cultural venues (pop-up lectures, public events, and street performances). We invite expansive investigations of multiple modernisms, especially those centering intersectional analyses including race, class, colonialism, sexuality, genders, geographies, and cultural hierarchies, and we encourage proposals that stretch the boundaries of “modernism,” in period (1870-1970), genre, style, and discipline.

 

We invite individual paper, panel, or roundtable proposals that engage with Provocative and/or Provoking Literary, Artistic, Performative, and other Cultural Forms situated between 1870-1970, such as:

• Sexual provocations and liberation
• “Bad” feminist provocations, both artistically and politically
• Feminist demands of radicality and revolution
• Black art forms’ movement from margin to center
• Climate, Ecology, and the Anthropocene
• Embodied provocations: health, reproduction, contraception, dis/ability, surveillance, imprisonment, technology, pleasure
• Agent provocateurs: fighting fascism, racism, and cruel capitalism
• Provocative media: photography, film, radio, documentary, visual and plastic arts
• Provocative collaborations: friendships, intersectional alliances, organizations
• Provoking women: spinsters, witches, lesbians, elders
• Provoking affects: anger, rage, irritation, anxiety, animatedness
• Provoking the historical record: Archiving women/women as archivists
• Provoking literary estates: Archival gate-keeping and literary afterlives
• Provoking cultural institutions and their arbiters
• Feminist modernist provocations: revising high modernism in light of “Me Too” and Black Lives Matter

 

Part of FiMA’s mission is to mentor and support graduate students at any level in their professionalization. FiMA encourages graduate students to propose individual papers and full panels with fellow graduate students and/or faculty mentors. Please note, this year, the selection committee will be nominating graduate student proposals for our “Emergent Voices” Graduate Student Plenary Session. Graduate students chosen for this session will be mentored and offered the opportunity for a practice panel session pre-conference. If you are a graduate student and would be interested in being considered for this session, please indicate so on your individual proposal.

 

Individual proposals should be 250-300 words and include a working title. Please also include a short bio.

 

Panel proposals (3-4 participants) should be no more than 600 words and include a panel title and working titles. Please also include short bios for each participant.

 

Rather than reading short papers and running out of time, participants on FiMA Roundtables (5-6 participants) should provoke conversation about a particular topic and include room for generative audience participation. Proposals should be no more than 600 words and include a description of the scope of the roundtable conversation and short bios for each participant.

 

 

Submit proposals to our Google form by December 1, 2023: https://tinyurl.com/FiMA24

 

Please direct any questions about the conference to Jaime Harker: jlharker@olemiss.edu