Staging Feminist Futures
Special Volume of Frontiers, A Women Studies Journal:
“Staging Feminist Futures” 41.3 (Feb. 2021)
Special Volume Editor: Kimberly Jew, University of Utah
Deadline: February 11, 2019
Space, energy, temporal fluidity, moving bodies, present voices and affect,
witnesses, narrative. The theatrical stage offers a moving, three-dimensional world in which to explore imagined embodiments and emotions, and to momentarily restructure the boundaries of identity, reality and nation. As Jill Dolan argues in her seminal book, Utopian Performance, live performance offers a special power to staged visions of utopian futures through the visceral, action-ready sentiment generated among audience members.
Such staged futuristic visions are not always without controversy. For
instance, Paige Connor, from Taylor Mac’s play Hir, tests the ethical balance of seeking reparations for past domestic abuse. In her zest to create a new, feminist world-order rooted in gender fluidity, ecological reclamation and matriarchal rule, she exacts punishment on her debilitated husband by dressing him up as a woman and refusing to change his soiled pants. In contrast, José Esteban Muñoz’s work on punk utopia offers a different vision of the futuristic stage. In his work, Muñoz suggests the complexity of time in engaging the future through performance: is punk utopia a stage for performance or rather a stage of life that one passes through? Janelle Monae’s cyborg fantasies of an afro-futuristic world offers yet another intriguing approach to utilizing creative temporal fluidity in order to excavate past and present intersectional dynamics of race, sexuality, gender and class.
This special volume seeks essays that explore possibilities for staging
feminist futurities through performance-based forms of theatre, film and
video, dance, music, performance art, solo performance and community engaged performance. Papers that center on feminist practice and rhetoric, collaboration, leadership, emerging aesthetics and approaches to embodied gender and racial formations on stage are especially welcome.
- Decolonized, hybrid and emerging stages and identities
- Queer bodies and desires
- Utopian and dystopian studies
- Women’s leadership, collaboration, and practices
- Transnational theatres – borders, outposts, migration
- Feminist futurities – Afro-futurism, environmentalism, political activism
- Artists of color
- Post-family studies
Please send a 500-word proposal to Frontiers at: FrontiersJournal@utah.edu
Deadline for proposal submission: Monday, Feb. 11, 2019
Questions may be directed to the Special Volume Editor: Kimberly.jew@utah.edu