How capitalism survives? A Marxist-Feminist perspective

The Historical Materialism annual conference in London has emerged as a pivotal site for critical, engaged, constructive, and provocative scholarship and activism internationally. This is a fitting place for focusing the (re)emergence of Marxist-Feminist historical materialist analysis. Now in our third year at HM, the 2014 Marxist-Feminist stream of the conference is seeking contributions that continue in the tradition of dynamic and original reflections of previous years, and also those that press the boundaries and take on the bold challenges posed by debates old and new.
The question ‘how capitalism survives?’ resonates strongly with a range of feminist critiques on the Left. In the 21st century this question invites us to revisit of the history of capitalism and patriarchy in their myriad entanglements as well as to analyse the daily (re)construction of a globally dominant socio-economic model that thrives on gendered and racial asymmetries.
The Marxist-Feminist stream this year wishes to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms that make the reproduction of capitalism possible in the very sites that constitute an ‘everyday life’ where exploitation and struggle are actualised or forestalled. We are also interested in analysing the continuities, discontinuities and mutations of the capitalism & patriarchy nexus from the age of empire all the way to contemporary neo-colonialisms. Such colonial projects may involve anything from territorially-based extraction of surplus value to the production of individual and collective subjectivities.
This year’s conference theme hopes to provide an opportunity to think in truly interdisciplinary fashion about how ‘we’ participate in sustaining capitalism as a reality of intersecting modalities of exploitation. To offer just one obvious example, today the exploitation of women by women has become indispensable to sustaining contemporary capitalism as a planetary biopolitics.

On the basis of the above, we invite papers that may address (but are not limited to) the following themes and/or questions, here presented in random order:

•    Critical descriptions of capitalism across Marxism and feminism from feminism’s ‘first wave’ to the present
•    Social reproduction and capitalist transformation: micro and macro-analyses
•    Instances of success and failure in Marxist-Feminist struggles from the 19th to the 21st centuries
•    In what particular ways does the ‘feminisation’ of labour help capitalism survive?
•    Are new concepts and methodologies needed to understand women’s roles in capitalism’s ways of overcoming the recent crisis?
•    How do the crises of capitalism help generate or overcome otherness (understood in gendered and/or racial terms)?
•    Women and queer subjects’ roles in the rise of new capitalist economies and in the assumed decline of Western capitalism
•    Homophobia and homonationalism before and after 9/11
•    Moving borders, regenerating boundaries: states, bodies, temporality
•    Ecosocialism, ecofeminism, ecology: narratives of change or scripts of subjugation?
•    Revolution and reform in the theories of Marxist-feminism
•    Racism, femonationalism, Islamophobia: the bigger picture
•    Intersections of Marxism, feminism, critical race and postcolonial theories
•    Sexual assault, rape and resistance
•    Women in contemporary liberation struggles
•    Marxist feminism and intersectionality theories
•    Women’s art, film, music literature: subversion or reproduction of capitalist relations of production?
•    Feminism and the reproduction of the capitalist art world
•    Women in the communist/socialist tradition: Luxemburg, Zetkin, Kollontai, and others
•    Welfare and the political economy of care
•    Contemporary sexual politics: resistance to or empowerment of capitalism?
•    Violence, fascism, Marxism and Feminism
•    Separatism or participation? The case for the 21st century
•    Feminism and the institutions of capitalism
•    Gender, race and international migration
•    Uniting forces: what does an interdisciplinary Marxist feminist theory would look like?


Paper proposals should be max 200 words. When submitting your proposal, please indicate the theme to which your paper could contribute.

Please note that we welcome panel proposals. When you submit a panel proposal, please send an abstract of the general theme of the panel (max 300 words) together with the abstracts of the individual papers in the panel. For individual paper proposals, it is helpful to indicate the theme (above) to which your paper could contribute. This will help us to compose the panels. Panels and individual papers should be submitted by June 1st to: http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/conferences/annual11/submit

Please be aware that the conference is self-funded; therefore we are unable to help with travel and accommodation costs.

The stream is organised by: Abigail Bakan, Angela Dimitrikaki, Sue Ferguson, Sara Farris, Genevieve LeBaron and Nina Power.