Calls
2i JOURNAL | IDENTITY AND INTERMEDIALITY STUDIES
CALL FOR PAPERS — Nº 10 (2024) : WOMEN AND/IN REVOLUTION: SELF-PORTRAITS OF IBERIAN FEMALE WRITERS AND ARTISTS IN THE POST-DICTATORSHIPS
Deadline for submissions of contributions: 15th June 2024
Editors: Eunice Ribeiro e Bruno Marques
Presentation
During the Salazar (1933-74) and Franco (1939-75) regimes, female sexuality, as well as other conceptions of “subaltern sexuality” (Guasch, 1997), was the object of several silencing strategies. The ways in which subalternity was rendered invisible, negated by dominant knowledge/power structures (Foucault, 1975), deprived it of voice and its own space of representation. This scenario began to change when new forms of self-representation of these subjectivities (Chamouleau, 2018) began to emerge during the democratic transition years in the Iberian Peninsula (Gaspar, 2018). Since the 1970s, women organized themselves in the form of activism for liberation, emancipation, and the assertion of their rights (Riggle; Tadlock, 1999). These resistance activities generated language subversions and alternative forms of self-expression as a combative strategy, constituting a symbolic rupture with the old system of systematic subaltern invisibility (Gaspar, 2018). As a group seen as a social minority, even though demographically the majority, subordinate to heteropatriarchy, women created their own modes of representation against the system that discriminated against them.
Focused on the topics of otherness and difference, contemporary self-representation in literature and art has privileged issues related to the affirmation of the female gender and sexual diversity. Portugal and Spain are, in this sense, similar case studies given that they share a very similar recent historical past — semi-peripheral, Catholic, dictatorial, colonial. In this sense, it is necessary to carry out a comparative analysis between the two Iberian countries, with the main objective of critically identifying both common and diverse strategies of resistance and empowerment.
In the year in which the fiftieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal is celebrated, this thematic issue of 2i Journal aims to reflect on heterodox modalities of self-portrait produced in the periods of the Portuguese and Spanish post-dictatorships by Iberian writers and women artists that history of literature and art have often neglected. In addition to regularly embracing topics of otherness and difference, the most recent self-representations by women authors raise issues related to the political assumption of sexual gender with significant frequency. The close connection of self-portrayal to narcissism and confessionalism makes self-portraiture a privileged path for assessing more or less profound and decisive changes in customs and mentalities, with direct repercussions on the questioning of the prevailing gender roles in a given sociocultural context.
Hence, the main question that this issue of 2i Journal aims to address is: after the colonial and dictatorial periods, how has the self-portraiture device been renewed by contemporary Iberian literature and art produced by women, contributing to the emancipation of previously subordinated, segregated, discriminated and stigmatized “female subjectivities”?
Contributions investigating the self-portrayal production of Iberian female writers and artists in the post-revolution period are welcomed, based on the possible topics for reflection indicated below.
Possible topics for reflection:
- Writing and authorship;
- Diaries and narratives of the self;
- Body, sexuality and love;
- Mirrors and masks, staging and disguises;
- Stereotypes and conventions;
- Freedom and censorship;
- Memory and trauma;
- Power and politics;
- Voice and subjectivity.
CALL FOR PAPERS — Nº 9 (2024) : COUNTERDISCOURSES OF FAMILY: UNDOING (THE) TIES
Deadline for submissions of contributions: 15th January 2024
Editors: Ánxela Lema París and Danny Barreto
Presentation
In a pioneering study, anthropologist Kate Weston (1991) shed light on the kinship network that people create beyond and/or in connection with their families of origin. These families we choose
are diverse and flexible, made up of children (biological or otherwise), lovers, friends, co-workers, and other relations that exceed biological or conjugal ties. These networks represent alternative social worlds to familism (The Care Collective, 2020), as well as economies of care that help people confront oppressive systems of homophobia, transphobia, racism, job insecurity, etc. Since then, many publications have reflected on queer kinship, questioning the biological and heteropatriarchal family, with its legal and economic legitimacy, as the only social unit possible (Hybris, 2022), but the debate remains unresolved. On the one hand, scholars have refuted the celebration of the queer family, since it problematically naturalizes the concept of family (Lewis, 2022) and reproduces family centralism and, on the other hand, pluralizing the family perpetuates the current system, serving the patriarchal and heterosexist capitalist model (Mogrovejo, 2014). Beyond these risks, both of which result in a homonormative family structure, any attempt to theorise or reimagine queer kinship must attend to the ways in which familial discourses have been used historically to justify the dispossession and exploitation of racialized and marginalized groups (Bradway & Freeman, 2022). For the above reasons, it is important to remember that family
, far from being a singular and monolithic concept, continues to carry with it different forms of privation and empowerment depending on the intersectionality of our positions in society.
In any event, this questioning of the notion of family is not only of interest to the LGTBI community, kinship has also mattered to people of all sexual orientations whose emotional, financial, domestic, and other ties do not follow the lines of dyadic sexual union and genealogical descent
(Freeman, 2007). In this sense, Alexandra Kollontai herself, in the 1960s, identified the family as the basis of women’s oppression. In short, it is about rethinking ties in light of Haraway’s oddkin
(2020), which does not deny affective ties, but rather seeks to broaden such structures without reducing them exclusively to the human sphere, re-examining them through a humanimal perspective (Segarra, 2022). Similarly, when feminisms speak of abolishing the family,
they are not proposing a rejection of affective ties, but rather a commitment to a horizontal, communal life that puts an end to the family as a reproductive institution of the class system.
Furthermore, we also see how in recent years a large number of feminist essays, novels and poetic works have been published that question a traditional or limited notion of maternity or of what it means to be (or not be) a mother. At the same time, the politics, social practices and representations of non-binary, trans, non-monogamous, non-heterosexual, and non-monosexual people are redefining cohabitation, camaraderie, family (and gender roles within it) and breaking with the promise of happiness
analysed by Ahmed (2019).
In this thematic issue of Journal 2i we explore the images and the discourses about the family that circulate in literature and cultural production. The articles in this volume, therefore, will offer a broad vision of non-normative families, past or present.
Some of the topics to be explored in this issue include:
- Representations of chosen families and of queer and non-monogamous affective, support networks;
- Abolition of the family: anticapitalistic collectives;
- Representations of interspecies relationships and of anti-humanism;
- Migration narratives and the alternative and/or intergenerational living arrangements that can result from migration;
- Cultural mappings of cohabitation in urban and rural spaces.
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