[Air-L] CFP for the themed issue of 'Subjectivity' on Radical Negativity.

[Ella Fegitz]

Dear Colleagues,


Please find below the latest call for papers for the special issue of the
journal 'Subjectivity' on the theme of Radical Negativity.


Many thanks for your interest and for sharing,


The editors

Ella Fegitz

Tiffany Page

Leila Whitley


--------------------------------


*CALL FOR PAPERS: Themed issue on ‘Radical negativity’*



Over the past decade, feminist and queer scholarship has begun to
productively address the dark aspects of human subjectivity, such as
unhappiness, irresponsibility, passivity, vulnerability, failure, shame,
hesitancy, pain, dispossession, disappointment, rage, madness and
depression, contributing to a rethinking and revaluation of the negative.
Critique has focused on how normative subject positions are powerful
mechanisms that reproduce dominant power structures such as whiteness,
patriarchy, sexism, cissexism, heterosexism, and ableism. Such normative
subject positions can demand or assume whiteness and thus position those
who are non-white as ‘invaders’ in the space of the institution (Puwar
2009), present gender subservience as happiness (Ahmed 2010), and demand
compulsory heterosexuality (Rich 1980). Resisting these (normative) demands
placed on identities can form subjectivities perceived to be oriented
around discomfort, refusal and pain.


Borrowing from Eve Sedgwick, this special issue proposes that forms of the
negative are “not distinctly ‘toxic’ parts of a group or individual
identity that can be excised; they are instead integral to and residual in
the processes by which identity itself is formed (2003, p.63).” In choosing
to conceptualise subjectivity through the possibility of treating the
negative as a viable and integral resource for resistance and a locus of
social change, this issue will pay particular attention to the relation of
negativity to resistant political practices. More specifically, we are
interested in how the formation of subjectivities based on negative states
and in relation to negative affects can be productive sites for political
engagement. What is opened up or made possible by attending to the negative
as an interruption to the force of restrictive social norms upon certain
psyche and bodies?


We welcome papers based in any discipline that significantly engage
feminist and queer theory to respond to one or more of the following
questions:



   1. How can the negative be conceptualised as an interruption to the
   force of restrictive social norms?
   2. How might rejecting the social compulsion toward positive affect
   allow for, and even become necessary to, resisting normative structures of
   power?
   3. If we accept that power can differentially produce subjects, and that
   there is a relationship between power and resistance, how do these
   differences in turn utilise the negative, and what is the negative’s role
   in the capacity to resist?


Possible topics include, but are not limited to, explorations of:

   - the construction of normative subjectivities and their effects on
   those deemed not to ‘fit’
   - the construction of subjectivities in relation to narratives of trauma
   or shame
   - queer subversion in the face of ambivalence, incoherence and
   difficulty
   - the relation between politics and the construction of ‘woundedness’
   - the distribution (and understanding) of vulnerability
   - the construction of health, happiness or ‘goodness’
   - the racialization of affect
   - the gendering of affect
   - the navigation/rejection of gender norms and cis-sexism
   - the ways in which gender, sexuality, race and ability inflect the
   interpretation of affect more generally
   - deviance
   - name-calling


Issue editors: Ella Fegitz, Tiffany Page and Leila Whitley.


The deadline for first drafts of papers is 1 May 2016. Papers should be
submitted in the first instance to radicalnegativity at gmail.com and should
follow submission guidelines for Subjectivity (
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/sub/author_instructions.html).


The editors are happy to discuss possible papers informally with potential
contributors. Please contact: e.fegitz at gold.ac.uk; cup01tp at gold.ac.uk;
l.whitley at gold.ac.uk.



*References*

Ahmed, Sara. 2010. *The Promise of Happiness.* Durham and London: Duke
University Press.

Puwar, Nirmal. 2004. *Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of
Place. *Oxford: Berg.

Rich, Adrienne. 1980. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian
Existence,” *Journal
of Women in Culture *

*and Society, *5, 4, 631-660.

Sedgwick, Eve. 2003. *Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity*.
Durham and

London: Duke University Press.