[ecrea] CFP: Mothers of Invention: Parenting and/as Filmmaking Practice

Call for Papers:


MOTHERS OF INVENTION: PARENTING AND/AS FILMMAKING PRACTICE, co-edited by 
Corinn Columpar and Sophie Mayer.

In 1983, E. Ann Kaplan famously called second-wave feminist film culture 
a movement created by daughters “unwittingly…repeat[ing] the patriarchal 
omission of the Mother.” By way of what Charlotte Brunsdon has called 
disidentification, several scholars and practitioners associated with 
more recent varieties of film feminism, from its third wave to its 
“post” incarnation, have, unwittingly or not, followed suit. Swimming 
against this tide, Mothers of Invention invites contributors to help 
construct a feminist genealogy of a different sort, one that foregrounds 
the relationship between acts of production on the one hand and those 
associated with reproductive and caring labour on the other. More 
specifically, it seeks to build on the ground-breaking industry research 
already underway at the Raising Films campaign in the UK and Moms in 
Film in the US in order to create an interdisciplinary edited collection 
that considers the role that parenting, as both a theme and a 
diversified practice, plays in film and media cultures.

Mothers of Invention welcomes essays about fatherhood and film and 
media, but the balance of the volume will be weighted toward mothers and 
female carers, particularly those from communities that have been 
historically under-represented, marginalised, and/or excluded from film 
and moving image practice. As much as the film and media industries, 
especially at the commercial end, present a challenge for all people 
with caring responsibilities, those who identify as female remain 
disproportionately responsible for caring and domestic labour. It is 
precisely the nature of this challenge – as well as the acts of creative 
invention and innovative resistance it has inspired – that are of 
interest to this volume. Indeed, works as diverse as Mary Kelly’s Post 
Partum Document (1973-79), Agnès Varda’s Daguerréotypes (1976), Arnait 
Video’s Before Tomorrow (2008), and Sophie Hyde’s 52 Tuesdays (2013) 
incorporate parenting and caring labour into both their narrative 
content and their artistic practice and thereby contribute to a 
transnational and transgenerational body of work has yet to be 
considered through the lens of feminist parenting studies.

We invite contributions on historical and contemporary global moving 
image practices, across the spectrum from industrial to artisanal and 
concerning all key production roles. We are open to a wide range of 
approaches, from close readings of film and media objects to industrial 
analyses to studies of circulation and spectatorship, and we welcome 
work from a variety of disciplines, including the following: film, 
television, and/or media studies; cultural and creative industries; 
women and gender studies; moving image practice-based research; media 
anthropology; and cultural studies. Finally, following Lisa Baraitser’s 
definitional essay ‘Mothers Who Make Things Public’ (2009), we use the 
term mother to “denote anyone who both identifies as female and performs 
primary maternal work, with a ‘child’ being understood as the other whom 
such a ‘mother’ elects, names and claims as her child,” and carer to 
denote anyone who performs primary physical and emotional work 
unremunerated for a partner, parent, sibling, other family member, or 
friend.

Please submit a 500-word proposal and brief biographical note to 
(corinn.columpar /at/ utoronto.ca)<mailto:(corinn.columpar /at/ utoronto.ca)> and 
(sophie /at/ sophiemayer.net)<mailto:(sophie /at/ sophiemayer.net)> by 1 August 2017. 
We anticipate that finished essays will be approximately 6000 words in 
length, including notes, and we plan to send out acceptances of 
proposals by the end of September 2017.


Feel free to email us prior to the deadline with any questions.



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