Call for Contributors- Signs: Journal Of Women In Culture And Society

Call For Papers
Special Issue of Signs: Journal Of Women In Culture And Society

"Gender and Cultural Memory", co-edited by Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith

Although the reshaping of cultural memory and the inclusion of women's works, stories and artifacts have always been the driving force of feminist scholarship, it is only in recent years that feminist scholars have been drawn to theoretical questions dealing with memory, trauma, and transmission. Some of this work -- on autobiography and memoir, on representations of war, exile and diaspora, on sites of memory and memorialization, and on the traumatic memory of sexual abuse -- has engaged gender issues specifically. But other areas of cultural and collective memory, especially perhaps the politics of nostalgia, and the memory and "postmemory" of the Holocaust, have been strangely resistant to feminist analyses of gender and sexuality or to feminist engagements with ideas of race, nation and class. As the interdisciplinary work on trauma and cultural memory becomes ever more sophisticated and as testimony acquires the status of an important literary genre and legal source, a sustained theoretical inquiry into the connections between memoy and gender has become more urgent.

This issue will feature articles that examine different modes of memory (personal and cultural, traumatic, "deep" and "ordinary," "embodied"), as well as different theoretical models of memory, postmemory and nostalgia, through a number of specific examples that will lend themselves to a gender analysis. These examples can be literary, artistic, cinematic, architectural, performative, ritualistic, or popular. They may reflect on contestation, revision, forgetting, silence and amnesia in the shaping of memory and postmemory, as well as on the more practical issues of the preservation of memory in archives, museums, monuments and collections.

The editors particularly seek essays that provoke a more general conceptual and theoretical understanding of gender and cultural memory.

The special issue editors are Marianne Hirsch (French and Comparative Literature, Dartmouth) and Valerie Smith (English and African American Studies, UCLA).

Please submit articles (five copies) no later than January 31, 2001, to
Signs, "Gender and Cultural Memory"
Public Policy Building
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90095.

Please observe the guidelines in the "Notice to Contributors" printed in the most recent issue of the journal.

Last updated:    April 2000

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