Care Feminisms, Crip Futures CFP!

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Dobbs decision, and recent legislation banning gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth in a significant majority of states in the southeastern region, analyses of public health disparities and the socio-economics of caregiving require our urgent attention as feminist theorists, educators, and activists. To attend to these matters, the role of feminist disability studies, crip theory, and care feminisms in the field of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is arguably more important than ever. With a broad interest in the work of cripping WGS, we invite proposals for individual papers, panels, and roundtables with a focus on care feminisms and crip futures. While this topic is a major focus of the conference, proposals are welcome on all aspects of work in WGS.

As you develop your proposals, some guiding questions might include the following: What does care work in the service of social transformation look like? How has care operated as a nexus of oppression integral to the reproduction of injustice, and how has it been mobilized as part of the ongoing work of liberation? What can feminist thought learn from disability justice, crip studies, mad studies, neuroqueer theory–and vice versa? What transformations does care work undergo in the wake of ongoing state abandonment and intensifying precarity? What political and conceptual tools do crip studies and care feminism offer us as we participate in transformative worldmaking? 

Topics may include, but are certainly not limited to:

• Care, vulnerability, precarity, gendered ableism, state abandonment, rurality, community organizing, mutual aid, unexpected alliances

• Biomedicalization, wellness, medical access, and healthcare, especially for BIPOC, disabled, chronically ill, mad, neuroqueer, birthgiving, and LGBTQIA+ folks

• Geographies and geopolitics of care, dependency, disability justice, reproductive (in)justice, ecofeminism, climate change, anthropocenic catastrophe, grief, crip ecologies

• Intersections of care feminism and crip theory with critical race theory, critical trauma studies, critical addiction studies, critical trans studies, queer feminisms, critical migration studies, new materialisms, critical affect studies, transnational feminisms, or critical animal studies

• Transformative world-building through friendship, queer kinship, and care beyond the nuclear family, including polyamory, non-monogamy, and the relationship between care, jealousy, and comparison

• Crip creativity, disabled life-hacks, new self-representations in first-person narratives by disabled feminists; new cultural representations of non-normative or anomalous bodies, minds, and lives in literature, television, film, art, or digital media

• Reflections on conceptual innovations from foundational and emerging scholars of feminist disability studies, care feminisms, mad feminisms, and crip theory; the role of BIPOC feminists in (re)shaping feminist disability studies; the role of disability in BIPOC feminist theory; or engagements with the legacy of the late Dr. Drue Barker, a feminist economist whose work addressed caregiving as a labor issue.

• Feminist cripistemologies (or disabled ways of knowing) in the classroom; i.e., cripping WGS through curriculum, pedagogy, accessible learning environments, service-learning projects, and community partnerships

• Caring about WGS:

  • Strategies for developing majors, minors, and certificates in WGS and recruiting students to enroll in them – to care about feminist theories, methods, and movements – as we mark the 50th anniversary of the WGS program at USC and the 25th anniversary of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at USC Upstate.

  • Addressing the needs and well-being of students, faculty, and administrators in WGS, beyond neoliberal imperatives of self-care and campus wellness

  • Institutional histories of WGS program-building in the southeastern region

  • Reflections on the future of the field, crip or otherwise

Early Bird Deadline: November 19th, 2023

Final Deadline: December 17th, 2023

Notifications: by January 14th, 2024