Colleagues Sukla Chatterjee, Natalie Tal Harries and Helena Ifill (LLMVC) are working together to develop a cross-disciplinary, cross-period, cross-cultural edited collection on the figure of the Angry Woman. They encourage submissions from as wide a range of contributors as possible.
Call for papers:
Anger as an affect occupies a special place in our societies and cultures. Newhauser and Martin, in their foreword to Barbara Rosenwein’s book Anger, describe anger as an excess or deficiency of some emotional substratum, which is dependent on society and the tools (language, social environment) that are offered to the individuals of society (Foreword: 2020). Anger and rage, as opposed to tolerance and tranquillity, have been topics of discussion, debate, and contention across cultures and emotional communities. However, for something as timeless and universal as anger (together with the emotions of rage, scorn, and wrath), gender has also been one of the crucial determining factors in how society views and sanctions angry outbursts. Women’s relationship with anger has a long and troubled history where repressing one’s temper has been often portrayed as more feminine and expression of the same as more masculine. However, we live in an age where angry women’s voices and acts have become upheaving and incendiary. Hence, this book project addresses an enduring topic that is also very contemporary and relevant to our societies.
The proposed edited volume will address anger and allied emotions as expressed through the figure of the angry woman. Women, especially those marginalized within patriarchal societies, have been conditioned to compliance and submission. Feminine virtues have been projected as at cross purposes with violent and emotional outbursts, and restraint has been determined and established as a hallmark of fortitude. However, we have come a long way since then, and feminist struggles have often brought us face-to-face with the angry woman, who responds, occupies, disrupts, vents, challenges, and destroys, often with a purpose to rebuild. This volume is interested in exploring the epistemic productivity of anger that rises to face atrocity and oppression, as well as unproductive and unmoderated manifestations of anger that fail to serve their, or even lack, purpose. Can we identify unique or distinctively feminine expressions of anger? What are the characteristic ways in which women have expressed, or been represented as expressing, anger? What are the affective and narrative strategies that are employed in literature to portray anger and angry women? How is anger related to gendered power and powerlessness? Can anger be central to the formation of female communities? How can we theorize anger, especially in its relation to power, repression, and mental conditioning? How have women negotiated with the social conditioning that has encouraged them to be docile and obedient and transformed themselves into angry subjects? These are some of the questions that this volume seeks to address.
Submissions can address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- Angry women in literature
- Anger and overlapping and allied affects in feminist literature
- Angry women and the (postcolonial) state
- Women and crimes of passion
- Theorizing anger as an affect
- Protest movements and women
- Angry man vs. the angry woman
- Anger management, society, and women
- Surviving one’s own anger
- The enraged body
Given the interdisciplinary nature of the project, we welcome contributions centred on the figure of the angry, defiant woman and the ways anger and wrath are manifested. The project will accommodate literary, cultural, and sociological explorations from a transhistorical and transglobal perspective.
Abstract length: 350 words
Full paper: 7000, APA
We envisage that the collection will be divided into three parts:
Part 1: The Figure of the Angry Woman in Literature
Part 11: Societies, Women, and Their Cultures of Anger: The Rhetoric of Rage
Part 111: Rage and Bloodlust: Autoethnographic Narratives of Anger and Revenge
Please send us your abstracts, accompanied by a short author’s bio (including your affiliation and disciplinary background), to sukla.chatterjee@abdn.ac.uk by January 10, 2024.