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ABSTRACT Mar 15
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CFP Contemporary Feminism and the Politics of Emotion (National Women's Studies Association annual conference)

San Juan Puerto Rico
Organization: National Women's Studies Association
Event: National Women's Studies Association annual conference
Categories: American, Interdisciplinary, British, Popular Culture, Gender & Sexuality, Women's Studies, African-American, Colonial, Revolution & Early National, Transcendentalists, 1865-1914, 20th & 21st Century, Medieval, Early Modern & Renaissance, Long 18th Century, Romantics, Victorian, 20th & 21st Century, Aesthetics, Anthropology/Sociology, Classical Studies, Cultural Studies, Environmental Studies, Film, TV, & Media, Food Studies, History, Philosophy
Event Date: 2025-11-13 to 2025-11-16 Abstract Due: 2025-03-15

CFP Contemporary Feminism and the Politics of Emotion
Proposed Panel Submission for NWSA 2025 Conference dates: Nov. 13th-16th, 2025
Submission Deadline: March 15th

Twenty years ago Sara Ahmed published The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh UP 2004). In that groundbreaking work, Ahmed argues that emotions “move subjects into feminism . . . . precisely by reading the relation between affects and structure, or between emotion and politics in a way that undoes the separation of the individual from others” (174). She asks, “In what . . ways do the emotions that bring us into feminism also take us to a different relation to the world in which we live?” (178). In that same text, by studying white nationalism and racist, patriarchal institutions in the U.S. and U.K., Ahmed interrogates those dominant “affective economies” that “work to bind subjects together” through the “concealment” of histories of domination (121). In the last two decades, Ahmed has continued her analysis of the sociality of emotions and the work emotions do in colonialism, nationalism, heteropatriarchy and white supremacy and within the politics of social movements. Ahmed’s scholarship builds on the work of such feminist activists and scholars as Berenice Johnson Reagon and Audre Lorde on the politics of difference, discomfort, fear, anger, and the erotic, love in bell hooks, and Lauren Berlant on compassion and optimism.

This panel seeks to continue this feminist tradition by asking what insights the work of feminist cultural theories of the emotions can offer us today as we grapple with how to show up for one another, how to fight neofascism and the normative continuation of domination and violence against the most vulnerable. The proposed panel responds to the conference subtheme on solidarity and resistance in its focus on how feminist theories of feeling have anchor understandings of feminist and queer resistance and solidarity.


Please submit 100 word abstracts with AV requests to Ann Kennedy at tanya.kennedy@maine.edu by March 15th.

tanya.kennedy@maine.edu

Ann Kennedy