[Commlist] CFP Digital Feminist Activisms

*CFP: Digital Feminist Activisms: The Performances and Practices of 
Online Public Assemblies*

*Due: May 30, 2019*

http://www.qcollaborative.com/2019/04/12/cfp-digital-feminist-activisms-the-performances-and-practices-of-online-public-assemblies/

**

Editors: Dr. Shana MacDonald (University of Waterloo), Dr. Milena 
Radzikowska (Mount Royal University), Dr. Michelle MacArthur (University 
of Windsor), Brianna I. Wiens (York University)

With the rise of what Jessalyn Keller and Maureen Ryan have called 
“emergent feminism,” we are witnessing a moment marked by the “sudden 
reappearance” of strident critiques of gendered inequalities within 
popular discourse (2018, 2). More often than not, emergent feminisms are 
amplified online through social media by popular feminism and celebrity 
endorsements (Banet-Weiser 2018, McRobbie 2009), which can 
problematically promote neoliberal values of individual consumer 
practices and competitive self-improvement as a forms of empowerment. 
And yet, access to social media has produced important and critical 
forms of feminist politics. In/Notes Towards a Theory of Performative 
Assembly,/Judith Butler (2015) advances the importance of bodies 
assembling in space as a form of protest that performatively asserts 
both “the right to appear” and demands “a livable life” for those in 
positions of precarity. While feminist visibility in the broader public 
eye has produced important dialogues, this politics of assembly 
simultaneously begs the question: “What about those who prefer not to 
appear, who engage in their democratic activism in another way?” (Butler 
2015, 55). There are many valid and powerful reasons as to why feminist 
activists may not want or be able to//appear given the dangerous climate 
of online spaces, rife with the violent misogyny of trolling culture. 
These forms of publicness and erasure are equally important to consider 
within current considerations of emergent feminist practices online.

This book seeks to gather provocations, analyses, creative explorations, 
and/or cases studies of digital feminist practices from a wide range of 
disciplinary perspectives including, but not limited to, media studies, 
communication studies, critical and cultural studies, gender and 
sexuality studies, performance studies, digital humanities, feminist 
HCI, and feminist STS. The book frames digital feminisms as forms of 
public assembly that are performative and theatrical; that is, 
performative in that they can offer, “a process, a praxis, an episteme, 
a mode of transmission, an accomplishment, and a means of intervening in 
the world” (Diana Taylor 2003, 15), and theatrical in that they are 
events that may include characters, plot, the invocation of an audience, 
and the collective labour of multiple collaborators. In this way, 
digital feminist practices foster counterpublics––communities that 
enable “exchanges...distinct from authority” that “have a critical 
relation to power” (Michael Warner 2002, 56). This book seeks to 
consider how digital feminist activism uses conventions of assembly, 
performativity, theatricality, and design to counter the individualizing 
forces of postfeminism and neoliberalism while foregrounding the types 
of systemic change so greatly needed, but often overlooked, in this climate.

List of possible topics:

  * Feminist hashtag activism; feminist, anti-racist, decolonial, LGBTQ+
    hashtag movements
  * Closed virtual feminist communities and safe(r) spaces
  * Feminist and post-feminist forms of digital culture
  * Intersectional feminism online
  * LGBTQ+ digital cultures
  * Black, indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) digital cultures
  * Transnational digital feminism
  * Popular and celebrity feminism online
  * Feminist responses to online misogyny
  * Feminism and post-feminism on Instagram and/or Twitter
  * Feminist, queer, and BIPOC meme
  * Feminist, queer, and BIPOC design
  * Gamergate and implications of online misogyny in game culture
  * Methodological and/or theoretical approaches to feminist digital 
culture

Please submit a 250-350 word abstract, a brief author bio, and any 
questions to Brianna I. Wiens ((bwiens /at/ yorku.ca) <mailto:(bwiens /at/ yorku.ca)>) 
by*May 30th, 2019.*Accepted submissions should be 6000-7000 words and 
will be due to the editors by*November 1, 2019*.

*References*

**

Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2018. /Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular 
Misogyny./Duke University Press.

**

Butler, Judith. 2015./Notes Toward a Theory of Performative Assembly/. 
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press.

Keller, Jessalynn and Maureen E. Ryan (eds). 2018./Emergent Feminisms: 
Complicating a Postfeminist Media Culture/. Routledge.

McRobbie, Angela. 2008./The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and 
Social Change./Sage.

**

Taylor, Diana. 2003./The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural 
Memory in the Americas/. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Warner, Michael. 2002. “Publics and Counterpublics.”/Public Culture 
14/(1): 49-90.


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