[acc-cca-l] CFP: The Mixed-up Politics of Disinformation, Anti-Feminisms, and Misogyny

Tue Mar 14 17:00:59 MDT 2023

Dear CCA list,
Please find below a CFP for a special Commentary & Criticism section that my colleague Michele White (Tulane University) and I are editing for Feminist Media Studies. Please email me if you have further questions about the call.
Thanks,
Jessalynn

The Mixed-up Politics of Disinformation, Anti-Feminisms, and Misogyny
Call for short papers for a Feminist Media Studies Commentary and Criticism Section
1500-word papers are due 1 June 2023
Jessalynn Keller, University of Calgary
Michele White, Tulane University

We believe that feminist studies and feminisms can be enhanced by considering the entangled politics of disinformation, anti-feminisms, and misogyny circulating within media cultures. Over the past decade, there has been significant mainstream and scholarly interest in the increasing prevalence of online disinformation and virulent, “popular” misogyny (Banet-Weiser 2018). Here we understand online disinformation as fabricated information and deceptive practices that are designed to injure and denigrate individuals and groups, forward political agendas, increase participants and page views, and generate income (Marwick, Kuo, Cameron, Weigel 2021; Freelon and Wells 2020). Related forms of targeted aggression and relentless misogyny are the most notable aspects of contemporary anti-feminisms (Ging 2019). While these mediated phenomena are the subject of important critical media studies scholarship (see Ging and Siapera 2019; Keller and Ryan 2018; White and Negra 2022), little of this research explicitly places online disinformation, anti-feminisms, and popular misogyny in conversation with one another. This Commentary and Criticism section attempts to do this, aiming to parse out how disinformation relies upon and bolsters anti-feminisms and misogyny within historical and contemporary media cultures. We believe that this identification of and intervention in the mixed-up aspects of disinformation, anti-feminisms, and misogyny are central to the ongoing development of feminist scholarship, feminist politics, and media studies.

We argue that anti-feminisms and misogyny are enacted in broad-brush accounts that simplify and disparage feminist histories and contemporary feminist engagements, consolidate all feminisms into a static and rigid structure, and disparage women and feminists as a means of further displacing disenfranchised people’s identities and rights (White and Negra 2022). Further, we engage with Sara Ahmed’s (2014) indication that “Anti-feminism is a structure of hearing, a way feminists are eliminated from a conversation; a way certain forms of critique are dismissed” before “being made.” We read Ahmed’s claim as a provocation to consider how anti-feminisms and misogyny operate as forms of disinformation, which are designed to silence feminists and advance anti-feminist political projects.

For this Commentary and Criticism section, we seek short reflections of 1500 words that explore some of these ideas and the critical methods that can be employed to address anti-feminist disinformation and facilitate vital feminist lives. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary and intersectional work that addresses how disinformation, anti-feminisms, and misogyny overlap with other forms of oppression, including anti-Semitism (Planert 2011), nationalist refusals of the other, racism, and xenophobia (Dragiewicz and Mann 2016).
Possible topics include:

  *   Social media celebrity misogynists and platform politics
  *   Audience responses/negotiations of the mixed up politics of disinformation, anti-feminisms, and misogyny
  *   Women’s participation in anti-feminisms and disinformation
  *   Intersectional feminist resistance to the intermeshing of disinformation, anti-feminisms, and misogyny
  *   Popular and scholarly methods of intervention into anti-feminisms that model inclusive feminisms

We intend for this section to catalyze research on the ways disinformation, anti-feminisms, and misogyny are tactically combined and to offer strategies for refuting these oppressive and delimiting practices.

Tentative Timetable:
1 June 2023, short papers of 1500 words and bios of 100 words due to the FMS portal of ScholarOne (please remember to select the title of the special section)
15 July 2023, Decisions and suggestions for editing sent to accepted authors
15 September 2023, Author revisions due back to editors
Winter 2023, Copyediting and proofing
Early Spring 2024, Publication of Commentary and Criticism Section

Please submit short papers of 1500 words and bios by 1 June 2023 to the Feminist Media Studies portal of ScholarOne (remember to select the title of the special section): https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rfms20

Information about the citation and formatting guidelines for Feminist Media Studies can be found at: https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?show=instructions&journalCode=rfms20#publication-charges

Queries can be sent to the following:

Jessalynn Keller, University of Calgary, jessalynn.keller at ucalgary.ca
Michele White, Tulane University, michele at tulane.edu

References
Ahmed, Sara. 2014. “Feminist Complaint.” feministkilljoys. December 5, Accessed July 1, 2019. https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/12/05/complaint/

Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2018. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Duke University Press.

Dragiewicz, Molly, and Ruth Mann. 2016. “Introduction to Fighting Feminism: Organised Opposition to Women’s Rights.” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 5 (2): 1–5.

Freelon, Deen, and Chris Wells. 2020. “Disinformation as Political Communication.” Political Communication 37 (2): 145–156.

Ging, Debbie. 2019. “Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere.” Men and Masculinities 22 (4): 638–657.

Ging, Debbie, and Eugenia Siapera, eds. 2019. Gender Hate Online: Understanding the New Anti-feminism. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Keller, Jessalynn, and Maureen E. Ryan, eds. 2018. Emergent Feminisms. New York: Routledge.

Marwick, Alice, Rachel Kuo, Shanice Jones Cameron, and Moira Weigel. 2021. “Critical Disinformation Studies: A Syllabus.” Center for Information, Technology, & Public Life (CITAP), Accessed 20 November 2022. http://citap. unc. edu/critical-disinfo

Planert, Ute. 2011. “Women’s Suffrage and Antifeminism as a Litmus Test of Modernizing Societies: A Western European Comparison,” In Imperial Germany Revisited: Continuing Debates and New Perspectives, edited by Sven Oliver Müller and Cornelius Torp, 107–123. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011.

White, Michele, and Diane Negra, eds. 2022. Anti-feminisms in Media Culture. New York: Routledge.

Jessalynn Keller, Ph.D. (she/her)
Associate Professor
Department of Communication, Media and Film
University of Calgary, Canada
jessalynn.keller at ucalgary.ca<mailto:jessalynn.keller at ucalgary.ca>
@jessalynn_marie

CP 2023 @ U of C: https://www.consoleingpassions2023.ca

The University of Calgary is located on traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta, which includes the Blackfoot Confederacy (comprising the Siksika, Piikani, and Kainai First Nations), the Tsuut’ina First Nation, and the Stoney Nakoda (including the Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Wesley First Nations).  The City of Calgary is also home to Métis Nation of Alberta, Region III.  The traditional Blackfoot name of the place we now call Calgary is “Moh’kins’tsis” .

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.ucalgary.ca/pipermail/acc-cca-l/attachments/20230314/b2f5d0c9/attachment.html>