Chloe Diamond-Lenow <[log in to unmask]>
CFP: Contributions for a Proposed Panel on Feminist Theoretical Approaches
to Encountering Animals for the National Women's Studies Association 2014

Call for Contributions
Panel for the National Women's Studies Association 2014
Panel Title: Encountering Animals with Feminist Theory: Transgressing the
Terms of Hu(man)ism

Philosophical critiques of humanist notions of interiority, self-presence
and consciousness, together with anti-subordination scholars'
deconstruction of the phallicized white subject of humanism, challenge and
de-center normative conceptions of the "human" subject. One of the urgent
tasks of contemporary theory seems to be that of redefining or
reconstituting the space originally occupied by this ostensibly unmarked
metaphysical subject. Human and non-human interactions represent a
particularly significant starting point for the analysis of new modes of
being or becoming as individuated entities embedded in racialized, gendered
and sexualized systems of power. Since they imply that traditional modes of
relationality are severely disrupted and that heteropatriarchal
anthropocentric assumptions must be abandoned in order to unblock channels
of communication, these points of encounters between humans and other
animals also provide potentially generative spaces for thinking about the
pluralization of singularities, modes of becoming and being-with or even
redefined notions of care and love for the Other--radical alterity.  This
panel engages with various questions about human and animal encounters from
a feminist and anti-racist perspective: How do humans encounter
animals--lives that are kin but not kind? In what ways are human encounters
with animals always already determined by raced, classed, gendered and
sexualized significations and material power relations?  How might we gauge
such encounters; what does a "productive," "meaningful," or "sustainable"
encounter look like? Does the encounter itself change the nature of the
participants? What emerges in the interstices between living beings when
species meet?

Please submit a 50-100 word abstract to Chloe Diamond-Lenow at
[log in to unmask] by February 19th (preferably before).

Chloe Diamond-Lenow
[log in to unmask]

-- 
Chloe Diamond-Lenow, MSc
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Feminist Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara


-- 
Chloe Diamond-Lenow, MSc
Doctoral Student
Department of Feminist Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara

############################

To unsubscribe from the FEAST-L list:
write to: mailto:[log in to unmask]
or click the following link:
https://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=FEAST-L&A=1