[Commlist] CFP: MAI Feminism & Visual Culture: Photography & Resistance

/MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture/ invites authors with expertise in 
visualand cultural studiesand related disciplines to contribute to our 
upcoming special issue on photography and resistance.Of particular 
interest are contributions that illuminate the lives and work of women 
and non-binary photographers and that draw on the insights and practices 
of anti-racist and intersectional feminism.

Photography, as Yvonne Vera writes, “has oftenbrought forth the most 
loaded fraction of time, a calcification of the most unequal,brutal, and 
undemocratic moment of humanencounter (1999). Photography has also been 
used as a form of resistance to repressive regimes, to oppose war and 
violence, and as a means to challenge heteronormative 
patriarchy.Photography offers both a means of critique and a way of 
making visible events and forms of power that are not intended to be 
seen. Feminist and LGBTQ+ photographers have taken up cameras as a way 
to produce entirely new visual vocabularies, to reimagine the world 
otherwise, and to challenge hegemonic ways of seeing.

The ways in which women and non-binary photographers made use of 
photography as a form of resistance comes into clear view at the time of 
the Second World War. Among the photographers who worked at this time is 
Claude Cahun, whose photomontages reinvent the human form and refuse 
normative conceptions of the body. In 1937, Cahun moved to the Isle of 
Jersey with her partner Suzanne Malherbe (who practiced as an artist 
under the name Marcel Moore). From the time of the German occupation of 
the island in July 1940, until they were arrested in 1944 and sentenced 
to death for their resistance activities, Cahun and Moore produced 
pamphlets and visual material that they distributed across the island in 
defiance of the Nazi occupation (Thynne, 2010). Photographers Emmy 
Andriesse, Eva Besnyö and Violette Cornelius formed part of the Dutch 
resistance movement, /De Ondergedoken Camera/ (the Hidden Camera). Once 
she obtained forged papers, Andriesse, who was Jewish, documented the 
Nazi occupation of Amsterdam at considerable risk (Baring, 2013).

Doris Derby; Diana Davies; Ruth-Marion Baruch and Maria Varela were 
among the women who documented the Civil Rights Era in the United States 
(Speltz, 2016). In the 1980s, Lesley Lawson, Deseni Moodliar, Zubeida 
Vallie and Gille de Vlieg were among the women who joined the 
anti-apartheid photography collective Afrapix. Many of their images draw 
attention to the key role played by women in the struggle for freedom in 
South Africa (Lawson, 1985; Comley, Hallett and Ntsoma, 2006).

Nan Goldin’s intimate portraits of her friends over several decades and 
through the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States refuse 
state-prescribed moralising and the silencing of alternative forms of 
kinship (Junge, 2016). Visual activist Zanele Muholi has used 
photography as a way not only to honour the lives of LGBTQ+ Black 
Africans but also as a form of advocacy in campaigns against homophobic 
hate crimes (Baderoon, 2011; Lewin, 2019). Nona Faustine’s “White Shoes” 
series (2014) consists of photographs of the artist in locations around 
the city of New York that evoke the repressed history of slavery in the 
United States and that reclaim the Black female body as a source and 
site of resistance against the violence of both the past and the 
present. (Diabate, 2020)

In the last decade, women and non-binary activist-photographers have 
taken part in resistance movements across the world, from the Arab 
Spring to Black Lives Matter. While recent exhibitions such as “Still I 
Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance, Act 2”, at the De La Warr Pavilion 
(2018); Another Eye: Women Refugee Photographers in Britain after 1933at 
Four Corners (2020); and a major solo show of the work of Zanele Muholi 
at the Tate Modern, (2020), testify to a growing interest in this field, 
the ways in which women and non-binary people have made use of 
photography as a form of resistance remains under-researched.

*Suggested topics include: *

*How feminist/ LGBTQ+ / anti-racist artists and activists have mobilized 
photographs as a form of resistance

*Women and non-binary photographers documenting conflict, protest and 
political violence

*How feminist, anti-racist and LGBTQ+ activists and activist collectives 
have produced photographs and/or made use of photographs

*The ways in which women and non-binary people have used photographs 
during times of conflict and war (feminist publications/ posters/ 
activism/ resistance archives)

*Women and non-binary photographers who participated in resistance 
movements during the Second World War

*Women and non-binary photographers who formed part of and documented 
anti-colonial struggles and the struggle against apartheid

*Photographers who have photographed their own bodies as forms of 
resistance to racist hetero-normative patriarchy (such as Berni Searle; 
Nona Faustine; Zanele Muholi)

*Photographers whose work provides a form of resistance to cultural 
amnesia and erasure

*Contributions that focus on the under-researched topic of the work of 
women photographers from Africa are welcomed!

We plan to publish this issue in the second half of 2021.

The guest editor for the special issue is Kylie Thomas (Marie 
Skłodowska-Curie research fellow, Netherlands Institute for War, 
Holocaust and Genocide Studies)

*300-word Abstracts due:*10 January 2021

*5**000-**7**000-word Full Papers due:*30 May 2021

Please consult the/ MAI /submission guidelines before submitting: 
https://maifeminism.com/submissions/ <https://maifeminism.com/submissions/>

<https://maifeminism.com/submissions/>
	
MAI: FEMINISM & VISUAL CULTURE (SUBMISSIONS) 
<https://maifeminism.com/submissions/>
maifeminism.com
MAI operates an innovative open peer review system. Submissions will 
only be published if recommended by peer reviewers & subject area editors.


Please send your abstracts and forward responses to this call 
(tokyliethomas.south /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(kyliethomas.south /at/ gmail.com)> and 
(tocontact /at/ maifeminism.com) <mailto:(contact /at/ maifeminism.com)>


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