Our third panelist is no longer able to join us in our proposal for the 2012 American Studies Association conference in San Juan, November 15-18, 2012. We seek a third panelist whose work seeks to problematize and interrogate gender and violence as mutually constituted and/or enforced categories of personal, political and legal subjectivity. We are interested in considering the ways in which violence, and narratives of violence, can be adopted and/or adapted in resistance to the ordering structures of the State, and the law.

The two papers pay particular attention to feminist theories of violence and power in order to understand conflicting narratives of retaliation and self-defense, while being attentive to the often-paradoxical outcomes that arise in specific historical contexts. One explores the use and disavowal of political violence by women’s and gay-rights organizations in the 1970s who sought to counter structural violence. Political subjectivity informed decisions to adopt or avoid political violence, and allowed activists both to mimic and resist the surrounding structural violence. The other paper examines the conflicting outcomes of an 1895 case where women’s rights activists enabled the acquittal of a young immigrant woman who had killed her seducer. Ironically, their short-term triumph over the double standard in sentencing intimate violence contributed to a long-term trend to adopt the (typically male) killer’s perceived provocation.

To propose a paper for this panel, please send a 250 word abstract and a CV by January 16 to Lisa Arellano [larellan@colby.edu] and Amanda Frisken [friskena@oldwestbury.edu].