[csaa-forum] TOPIA 13 Release

[Melissa Gregg]

> TOPIA presents new perspectives in feminist cultural studies
> TORONTO, July 20, 2005 -- TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 
> is pleased to announce the publication of its latest issue, Concrete 
> Matters: Feminist Cultural Materialism. Guest Editors Tracy Kulba, 
> Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Cheryl Suzack present a special 
> theme issue that examines the legacies of materialist theory and 
> cultural production in contemporary feminism.. Concrete Matters 
> features articles by Barbara L. Marshall, Julia Emberley, Jennifer 
> Henderson, Susan Hamilton, Lisa Robson, and The Cultural Memory Group 
> as well as an afterword by Jo-Ann Wallace.
>
> Barbara L. Marshall tracks the development of debates concerning 
> gender as a concept within feminism and in post/anti feminist 
> literature from the past decade.  Marshall explores the effacement of 
> material difference as an anchor for political identities through the 
> reassertion of universality against particularity.
>
> Julia Emberley examines the politics of desire in the formation of the 
> Western Bourgeois Woman to situate this figure in an economy of 
> dissimulation.  Emberley strives for a transnational and materialist 
> feminist politics of reading that critically challenges labouring and 
> desiring relations of power in colonial, postcolonial and global 
> contexts.
>
> Jennifer Henderson confronts the materiality of feminist discourse to 
> call for self-reflexive historicization and critique. Following 
> Deleuze and Foucault, the essay proposes the machinic assemblage as an 
> alternative metaphor for the organization of power and argues for 
> micro-analytic techniques.
>
> Susan Hamilton raises key questions about Victorian feminism's aims, 
> strategies, and sites of articulation through an analysis of Frances 
> Power Cobbe's 1878 essay, "Wife Torture in England." The paper 
> illuminates how Cobbe produced a new cultural narrative about feminism 
> by using a popular culture narrative mode, "the narrative of 
> sensation" to specific political ends in a particular textual space, 
> the periodical press.
>
> Lisa Robson focuses her analysis on women's education and rationality 
> in relation to late 18th-century radicalism by considering Amelia 
> Opies' feminist materialist critique of radical philosophy. Robson 
> argues that Opie reconstructs rationality by exposing the necessity of 
> its full cognizance of and connection to concrete reality.
>
> The Cultural Memory Group explores the memorialization of Theresa 
> Vince, who was murdered by a male colleague in 1996, and considers the 
> ethics of feminist memorialization and collaboration across 
> communities of difference. As a research collective of social justice 
> workers and academics, the Cultural Memory Group aims to practice 
> principles of feminist memorializing in their own composition and 
> methods and to produce activist research which both understands and 
> materially supports the hinge between memorialism and activism between 
> remembering Theresa Vince, protesting violence against women, and 
> changing the future.
>
> In her Afterword to the special issue, Jo-Ann Wallace revisits the 
> ideas of collectivity and community to value cultural feminist 
> materialism not only as a method of scholarly analysis but also as a 
> social practice that moves inside and outside of the academic 
> institution.
>
> For more information on TOPIA 13, contact Jody Berland, Editor, at 
> topia at yorku.ca, or visit www.yorku.ca/topia


Melissa Gregg
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies
4th Floor, Forgan Smith Tower
University of Queensland 4072
CRICOS provider number: 00025B

ph     61 7 3346 9762
mob  61 4 1116 5706
fax    61 7 3365 7184
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