Signs Special Issue: RAGE ( submission deadline September 15, 2019)

Signs Special Issue: RAGE
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society invites submissions for a
special issue titled “Rage,” slated for publication in the summer of 2021.

Feminists are raging.  This special issue will consider our rage as a
global, complex phenomenon that mandates interdisciplinary and
intersectional analysis. Rage is historical. Rage can be deeply
exclusionary, recognizable as a legitimate emotion for only a privileged
few. It is an instrument of patriarchy as well as a potential feminist
resource. Rage shapes moral claims for racial justice, movements against
gender violence, and opposition to the global rise of authoritarian
regimes.  Rage can do so in ways that both extend and depart from the
histories of feminist and queer raging that marked late-twentieth-century
radical feminism, global organizing against HIV/AIDS, and against police
brutality. Rage is embedded in the fabric of institutions, in public
policy, and in conservative rhetoric. It animates white supremacist and
patriarchal violence as well as feminist resistance.  Women’s rage has
historically been medicalized, pathologized, and perceived as antinormative
and antisocial. Yet rage also marks transgressive arenas such as black
feminist culture, thought, and politics. Black feminist theory has offered
critical insights on rage’s eloquence, uses, and violent racialization,
while public figures such as Serena Williams force us to grapple with rage
as public refusal, as well as a labor resource and commodified affect. This
special issue seeks to further explore rage as a conundrum, or double
agent, operating both for and against feminism: visceral, transgressive,
galvanizing, and socially constructed.

We welcome essays that consider political, social, and cultural
understandings of rage. Essays should address rage as a contested framework
and concept that shapes structural distributions of power, consolidated and
constituted through modern institutions and ideologies. We welcome essays
that theorize rage from decolonial, anticolonial, and intersectional
feminist perspectives to better understand the lives of women, and
subaltern, queer, trans, and nonbinary peoples. Essays should address rage
as a central analytical question for feminist theory and practice but may
also analyze rage as a dynamic concept, constituted in relation to other
affective modes, from sadness, grief, elation, and exhaustion to the
long-term effects of these emotional experiences on the body, on
marginalized communities, and on the workings of the state. Authors may
examine rage in individual narratives or collective experience — from the
everyday life of rage in performances of gender, affect, and embodiment to
the cultural and political life of rage in social and political movements,
to representations of rage in the arts. The special issue will address rage
in historical as well as contemporary perspectives, and will highlight the
significance of rage across time and diverse geopolitical spaces. We
encourage essays from all disciplines and fields, and from different
regions around the world, that present a clear and accessible
interdisciplinary argument and that speak to a wide audience.

Signs particularly welcomes bold essays that engage the complex dynamics of
rage as personal and social, affective, and political, and that consider
rage in empirical and theoretical ways.  These essays should consider
broader affective, political, social, and historical contexts. Signs
encourages essays that address large questions, debates, and controversies
without employing disciplinary or academic jargon. We welcome essays that
put rage in relation to race, sexuality, class, sexual difference, and
power. We seek essays that are forceful, passionate, strongly argued, and
willing to take risks. We are interested in essays that are historical as
well as those that engage contemporary situations, texts, performances,
representations, and movements. We invite essays that break with academic
conventions, as well as those that deploy those conventions creatively. We
seek essays that rage, as well as those that offer ways to move our
energies forward.

The deadline for submissions is September 15, 2019. Sarah Haley (UCLA),
Carla Kaplan (Northeastern), and Durba Mitra (Harvard) will serve as guest
editors of the issue. Manuscripts may be submitted electronically through
Signs’ Editorial Manager system at http://signs.edmgr.com and must conform
to the guidelines for submission available at
http://signsjournal.org/for-authors/author-guidelines/.
This call for papers is available for download as a PDF here:
http://signsjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/RageSignsCFP.pdf

=====
General list info and FAQ: http://comm.umn.edu/~grodman/cultstud.html