Feminist Readings 2:
Theory, practice and politics of reading today *
*15 – 16 April 2016,
University of Leeds. UK*
*Confirmed Keynotes Speakers:
Professor Anne E. Berger, University of Paris 8
Professor Tuija Pulkkinen, University of Helsinki*
*A symposium to be held at the School of Fine Art, History of Art &
Cultural Studies, University of Leeds.*
This two-day symposium poses the question of reading with feminist
theory, art and politics. It turns to reading and re-reading not only as
a critical and scholarly activity but also as a key aspect of feminist
political and artistic interventions. Reading is understood not only as
a critical approach that engages with a close study of a rich and
diverse landscape of feminist thought but also as a creatively engaging
process with its complexities, affinities, contradictions and differences.
The symposium follows a feminist tradition in which reading is a
political act, most recently endorsed and situated within pedagogy,
intimacy, aesthetics and postcolonial studies by Gayatri Spivak (2003,
2012). It intervenes in the field of feminist studies with a specific
focus on philosophy, psychoanalysis, critical analysis and the
production of ‘texts’, whether they take the form of literature, film,
visual arts or performance. Reading is conceptualised in the broadest
sense both as a concrete practice and as a metaphor for feminist
self-reflexivity, as a productive and creative process, a means and
space of transmission, transformation and imagination.
The symposium welcomes not only feminist readings of texts, readings of
feminist texts, or feminist readings of feminist texts but also –
precisely – works which aim to reflect on the productive complexity of
what ‘reading’ is or can do. This might be, for example, in relation to
feminisms and their ‘objects’, modes of gender, sexual difference(s),
sexuality and their intersectionality with race, class, language(s),
power structures, oppression and discrimination.
The symposium welcomes readings including but not limited to the
following topics
•feminist heritage, archive and genealogies
•intersectionality
•bodies and other materialities
•sexualities
•maternal subjectivities and creativity
•the limits of reading and beyond
•visual arts, film, literature, music and other languages
•postcoloniality or reading with the postcolonial
•institutions and their practices
•feminist/s writing
•actions and activisms
•power and resistances
•feminist futures and future feminisms
The symposium will be in English.
Conference fee: FREE
Abstracts of 200-300 words (for 20 minute papers, presentations and art
practices), plus a short biographical statement, should be submitted to
the symposium organisers by Friday 29 January 2015. Please submit to:
feministreading@gmail.com <mailto:feministreading@gmail.
We will be offering a limited number of small bursaries to presenters
who are unwaged and whose institutions cannot support them to come to
the conference. If you wish to apply, please submit a short paragraph
with your abstract explaining why you need the bursary in order to
attend the conference.
Symposium organisers:
Lenka Vráblíková (University of Leeds)
Elspeth Mitchell (University of Leeds)
Louisa Lee (University of York)
Feminist Readings 2 is a continuation of the inaugural symposium
/Lectures féministes/ that was held at the University of Paris 8 and the
Finnish Institute in Paris on 21 – 22 May 2015.
Feminist Readings 2 is in association with the Centre d’études féminines
et d’études de genre, University of Paris 8 and the programme for
Gender, Culture and Society, University of Helsinki.
