Contested Terrains: Women of Color, Feminisms, and Geopolitics

Keynote Speakers:

Kimberle Crenshaw, Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia and founder of the African-American Policy Forum. An international activist, Crenshaw is well known for her foundational scholarly work on intersectionality and critical race theory. Professor Crenshaw's publications include Critical Race Theory (edited by Crenshaw, et al., 1995) and Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech and the First Amendment (with Matsuda, et al., 1993). Her work on race and gender was influential in drafting the equality clause in the South African Constitution and she helped facilitate the inclusion of gender in the U.N. World Conference on Racism Declaration. In the U.S., she served as a member of the National Science Foundation's committee to research violence against women and assisted the legal team representing Anita Hill.

Sunera Thobani, Associate Professor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. A founding member of RACE (Researchers and Academics of Colour for Equity) and a past President of Canada¡¦s National Action Committee on the status of Women, Thobani¡¦s research focuses on critical race, postcolonial and feminist theory, globalization, citizenship, migration, Muslim women, the War on Terror and media. Professor Thobani is the author of Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2007) and numerous other works. As a public intellectual, Thobani is well known for her vocal opposition to Canadian support of the U.S. led invasion into Afghanistan.

Invited Sessions:

• Invited Panel honoring the work of Maria Lugones
• Invited Panel on U.S. Wars/Imperialism and the Women Within

Description of this year's theme:

Engaging in feminist theory in the 21st century requires placing emphasis on the "where" of its production. Such an emphasis includes considering the situated perspectives and geopolitical locations out of which a given theory is produced. Another equally important part of contemporary engagement in feminist theory concerns appreciating the ways that theory travels and changes through the traveling. The notion of contested terrains is invoked to refer to the many junctures of perspective, location and travel with which feminist theory must contend in an era of multinational reception.

For example, it is at the juncture of perspective, location, and travel that one finds the often contested political identifier "women of color." The term is contested not only because there is no singular ¡§woman of color¡¨ perspective and/or location, but also because of the diversity of possible stories of travel in and out of "women of color" spaces. As Jacqui Alexander explains, one is not born but becomes a woman of color. That "becoming" is by no means a given and, for many, "women of color"  is not a personal identifier. The term is contested, and its meaning is continually recreated through the contesting.

Feminism is practiced and theorized within contested terrains in a transnational world. Understanding the connections and disputes created by borders, castes, classes, and other boundaries is at the heart of geopolitics. Feminist geopolitical analyses concern the spaces, places, relations of power, and interchange among feminists in local, regional and global contexts, paying careful attention to the locations out of which we theorize and practice feminism(s).

This year's FEAST conference invites submissions that take up this notion of contested terrains in relation to women of color, feminism, and geopolitics. We welcome papers that take both theoretical and practical approaches to these issues and related issues in feminist ethics, epistemology, political and social theory more broadly construed.
Topics to consider may include, but are not limited to:

• Situated knowledges, including the racialized terrains of knowledge production
• Intersectional theories of space and plac

• "Women of color," "third world women'" 'women of the global South," "postcolonial women" and other descriptors as contested identifications
• Tensions between White/US feminism, women of color feminisms, third world feminisms, and transnational feminisms
• Women"s agency and autonomy as contested feminist assumptions
• Contested conceptions of home and homelands
• The different social locations and embodied experiences of racism
• Perspectives on trauma and violence, terrorism and conspiracy, security and danger
• The geopolitics of mobility and immobility, including tourism, migration, detention and deportation
• Gatekeeping geographies, technologies of surveillance and border patrols
• The geopolitics of intimacy, including the racialized affective labor of mail order brides, transracially and transnationally adopted children and migrant domestic workers
• Geopolitical analyses of neo-liberalism, global capitalism and militarism, including their effects on women of color
• Ecofeminisms and resource conflicts
• Solidarity movements among diverse groups of women of color and white feminist

For more information on FEAST or to see programs from previous conferences, go to:http://www.afeast.org

Questions on this conference or the submission process may be directed to the Program Chairs, Ranjoo Herr ([email protected]) and/or Shelley Park ([email protected]).