This special issue of Signs seeks submissions reflecting multifaceted, innovative, and interdisciplinary approaches to the question of displacement, as well as the potential for attention to displacement to address and transform central questions in feminist theory, including how feminists approach larger questions of space, place, and subjectivity. Feminist scholars have a long history of engagement with the question of displacement; across disciplines, feminist scholars have described, theorized, and critiqued gendered forms of displacement and how these displacements have shaped and reshaped geopolitics, national borders, political discourses, narrative form, and ethnic and racial formations both contemporarily and historically. Questions of place and belonging have long been at the heart of cultural work in literature, theater, visual culture, and the arts. The editors invite submissions on the theme of displacement widely conceived and at multiple scales—the subjective, the family, the city; regional, national, transnational, and global. Possible subjects include:
- How humanitarian and state responses to displaced persons depend on, reinforce, or transform gendered, racial, and sexual norms.
- Visual and narrative representations of displacement in relation to gendered and racialized subjectivities.
- Cultural representations of displacement, migration, belonging, and exile. Critical and historical investigations and comparisons of feminist ideas of these subjects.
- Reverberations of historical displacements in the contemporary world.
- Claims to space and place as forms of resistance to displacement or as the basis for social movements (i.e., landless movements, right to the city).
- Dispossession and displacement as central to neoliberalism, capitalist development, colonization, and slavery. How are dispossession and displacement related?
- How experiences of displacement reshape constructions of “home” or the nation.
- Critical assessments of homophobic and gender-based violence as sources of displacement.
- Gendered figurations of internally and externally displaced persons as threats to national sovereignty or borders. The production of new forms of intimacy through displacement or the creation of new social movements through and in response to displacement.
- The way that ethical norms and perspectives ignore or undervalue the importance of gender and gendered perspectives with regard to displacement.
Submissions for the Signs special issue on Displacement, edited by Denise Horn and Serene Parekh, are due on September 15, 2016. The full call is available at http://signsjournal.org/for-authors/calls-for-papers/#displacement.