I hate all you super dyke femi nazies.>
> From: ALBANY::INGRAHAM 31-OCT-1994 15:56:38.97
> To: INGRAHAM
> CC:
> Subj:
>
> We are seeking submissions to Materialist Feminism: A Reader,
> an anthology of writings by materialist feminists from 1975-1995.
> Materialist feminist work is distinguished by the claim that the
> critical perspective of historical materialism is historically necessary
> and empowering for feminism's oppositional political project. Materialist
> feminism calls for a consideration of the ways divisions of labor, state
> power, as well as gendered, racial, national and sexual subjectivities,
> bodies, and knowledges are all crucial to social production. While materialist
> feminists have made use of postmodern critiques of empiricism to develop
> analyses of the role of ideology in women's oppression, they have also
> insisted that ideology is only one facet of social life. This systemic
> view--the argument that the materiality of the social consists of divisions
> of labor, state power, and ideology--is one of the distinguishing features
> of materialist feminist analysis.
> During the 1980s identity politics--often formulated by academics in
> terms of social constructionism or the more popular multiculturalism--
> has increasingly suppressed systemic analysis, and postmodern cultural
> materialism is rapidly replacing more radical social theories. Materialist
> Feminism: A Reader will argue against this retreat to identity and cultural
> politics for the ways it keeps invisible the material links among the
> explosion of meaning-making practices, the exploitation of women's labor
> and the appropriation of women's bodies that continue to undergird the
> scramble for profits and state power in late capitalism.
> At the same time the Reader will offer trenchant materialist analysis,
> it is also primarily feminist. Efforts to address the relationship between
> patriarchy and capitalism have persistently characterized materialist feminist
> critique even as the monolithic perspectives of many of these explorations
> have been challenged and rethought. Recent work speaks to the complex
> intersection of social structures like patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, wh
it
> supremacy, and heterosexuality and extends our understanding of their
> historically specific and differentiated effects on women's and men's everyday
> lives. We hope the essays in the reader will exemplify a range of positions
> on how to address these social totalities as well as nuanced analyses of their
> articulated effects in specific social formations.
> The first section of the Reader will provide an archive of essays
> that delineate the debates out of which materialist feminism emerged as
> well as some of the pressing issues of the eighties. The second part will
> consist of previously unpublished writing.
> We invite contributions to Part II of the Reader from those who
> situate their work within the parameters outlined above. Send proposals,
> finished papers (20-30pp) or inquiries to either Rosemary Hennessy, Dept.
> of English, University at Albany, Albany, NY 12222 Hennessy@albnyvms or
> Chrys Ingraham, Sociology and Criminal Justice, Russell Sage College,
> Troy, NY 12180 Ingraham@albnyvms by January 15, 1995.
>
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