This panel will be submitted to the Contemporary French Civilizations: Intersections journal’s inaugural virtual conference. Read more about this new academic journal and its conference here.
(Queer) Care – Decoloniality – Environmental Justice
Blossoming in the field of Francophone studies are two critical interventions: the theorization of decolonial feminism (Françoise Vergès, Houria Bouteldja) and the “decological” studies that unearth the colonially-imposed environmental and epistemic injustices that mark the age of the Athropocene (Malcom Ferdinand, Samir Boumedine). While there are theoretical and political overlaps between the two interventions, this panel seeks to render those intersections more explicit, in order to deepen the conversations between these two burgeoning fields. (1) In other words, we consider the project of decolonizing the (hu)Man body as inextricable from decolonizing the (hu)Man-nature relationship, a relationship that is implicitly gendered and racialized. The panel thus invites studies of Francophone and French creative, philosophical, or cultural texts and/or practices that address questions such as, how do these texts/artworks/objects/practices articulate, interrogate, or trouble the gendered labor of caring for the planet? What does queer carework and kinship look like from an interspecies perspective? Can creative/artistic practice contribute to the uBuntu “making of humanity together” that Souleymane Bachir Diagne argues is essential for the future of the planet? (2) How do other Francophone and French BIPOC thinkers and creators imagine alternative spaces to discourses of settler-colonialism, racism, ableism, corpeal disposability and territorial dispossession? What are the possibilities, and limitations, of decolonization and decoloniality as the lens through which we study gender and environmental justice? These questions and key words are not meant to be prescriptive, but rather to signal the broad range of conversations that this panel hopes to elicit.
Paper proposals due May 24th (see timeline below). Submit via this link. Questions can be addressed to Dr. Abigail E. Celis (aecelis@psu.edu) and Dr. Johanna Montlouis-Gabriel (jmontlo@ncsu.edu)
Timeline:
May 24: Submit an anonymized 250-300 word abstract and brief bio/affiliation to panel organizers
June 7 (approx.): Individual panelists notified of acceptance
Early July (approx.): Conference organizers notify panel if accepted
September 10: Papers due to panel organizers
September 24-25: Virtual conference
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(1) Examples of scholarly works that begin to sketch out these intersections include Vanessa Agard-Jones, “What the Sands Remember,” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, 18.2-3 (2012) 325-346 and Julia Frengs, “Anticolonial ecofeminisms: Women’s Environmental Literature in French-Speaking Oceania,” French Cultural Studies, 31.4 (2020) 293-303.
(2) “Faire humanité ensemble et habiter la terre,” Présence africaine. 193.1 (2016) 11-19