[Discussion] CFP: Gender and Culture, Space and Place (10/1/02; journal issue)

[gonul@Bilkent.EDU.TR]

Call for Papers - Critical Matrix

Critical Matrix, an interdisciplinary journal of gender and culture, is
seeking submissions from all disciplines for an issue devoted to questions
of space and place. Possible topics might include but are in no way
limited to:

* Urban politics, and transformations therein which are tied to and in turn
driven by fluctuations in gender. dynamics and the visible manifestation of
roles, regulations, power structures.
* Architectural and artistic practices.
*Public, private, domestic and intimate realms.
* Literature and film.
* Practices and conditions which are simultaneously local and discrete in
their impact and manifestation yet potentially transnational in their
comprehensibility and appeal.
* Alternative spaces and practices within and against the ongoing incursion
of technological media and digital culture into everyday life.

      In the last forty years, various artistic, academic, critical and
cultural practices have interrogated the production and coding of space as
it impacts contemporary identities and experiences. Recent assessments of
contemporary culture are suspicious that this interrogation has lost much
of its critical purchase and that we are now faced with a renewed wave of
cultural relativism. That is to say that the forms and means of disparate
practices become potentially transparent to the unreflexive presentation
of their content drawn from around the globe, be it race, class, gender,
or place. Such practices run the risk of being merely topical and
expressive. To minimize the content of such work reflects on the one hand
a frequently perceived need for attention to larger historical and global
political questions. However, if rendered too abstract, this approach has
significant and damaging limitations.  To take a recent example, this
tendency allowed apologists of the war on Afghanistan to resolve and
thereby dismiss the oppression of Afghan women. On the other hand, the
charge of relativism reveals the problematic advance of globalization in
actuality and under its mythical cover as a foregone conclusion. Inside of
this condition, the proliferation of digital technologies and media
suggest a further need for critical attention to questions of gender and
space as the processes and rituals that enliven and redefine both are
subsumed within virtual spacetime. Indeed, even work that seeks to resist
the digital condition is already reflective of it, as artists and critics
move beyond melancholic and nostalgic models to suggest that in
literature, film, and the plastic arts, what counts now may be less the
possibility for each of these mediums to generate distinct forms of
experience, but that they uniformly manifest a historical condition of
belatedness in which the past lingers on to accentuate, but also to temper
new and critically effective works of art at a time when everything, and
more of it, is newer than ever. However, the audience and historical
subjectivity produced by such works remains only broadly articulated
(however vestiges of place, as in certain installations by Mona Hatoum,
may partially counter and clarify this condition, and perhaps overturn its
logic of diminished returns, and contest, also, the potential
arbitrariness of installation art as a genre).  And within this context
there still exists for architectural and artistic practices a frequent
antinomy between deterritorialized spaces in which the ephemeral grain of
lived historical experience may still obtain, and more institutional
spaces that can still be utilized and resisted to produce concrete forms
of historical awareness. Questions of gender matter in such instances as
they can be used to bridge this and other levels of separation.

Submissions need not be based in current topics.   Historical work, or
simply work on objects, texts, and practices more remote from the
present will also speak to these concerns, perhaps preserving them in an
archival gesture as they seem, increasingly, to be transformed and to
disappear.

Please refer to this site for submission guidelines:
http://www.princeton.edu/~prowom/CM/call.html.
(Due to operating constraints, Critical Matrix is unable to offer
reviews of manuscripts not selected for publication.)

Deadline: October 1, 2002


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