The National Women’s Studies Association is just around the corner. It’ll be my first time attending and I have heard very good things about it.

Some colleagues and I put together a panel ages ago and I am now very much looking forward to meeting them in Puerto Rico!

Here is our panel description:

Inadequate Feminist Approaches Breed Inadequate Justice Creation

This panel exposes inadequacies in feminist approaches by exploring normative orientations that obfuscate our ability to make sense of complex phenomena. By transgressing these approaches, more comprehensive justice-seeking strategies can be generated. This work contributes to a wider ‘turn’ in (or away from) feminist scholarship by engaging with queer, crip and masculinity studies as alternative sites of explanatory power.

Whether it is through an inadequate violence against women paradigm that has yet to resolve competing knowledges, inadequate anti-client discourses and practices ingrained within sex work scholarship, inadequate pity/saviour narratives that conflate refugees with disability in debilitating ways, or inadequate attention to materiality in favor of discourse in analyses of violence prevention, this panel deliberately exploits very disparate subject matter to contemplate broad theoretical interventions in feminist scholarship that can generate new and creative justice-seeking strategies.

The organization of this panel is as follows: four speakers will spend 8-10 minutes each introducing their research site, current challenges (framed as feminist inadequacies) and strategies for creating justice that are rooted in transgression; the moderator will then engage the panel in a discussion of the below questions; finally, 15-20 minutes will be reserved for audience questions and comments.

Panel discussion will revolve around the following: (1) In what ways have feminist approaches become inadequate in the quest for justice? How might feminist approaches unwittingly perpetuate injustice? (2) When transgressing feminist scholarship, what common shifts in direction, aim or focus can be identified? (3) How might transgression jeopardize justice creation? What is at risk?

(Image credit: National Women’s Studies Association)