Feminist Modernist Studies

Feminist Modernist Exiles

“[T]he position of the writer – at least the modernist writer – maps easily onto the position of the outsider, and some writers have famously chosen exile, precisely for the bonus of that sharp angle of vision, the bracing coolness of distance and defamiliarization” (Eva Hoffman, “Out of Exile”).

We invite proposals for a special issue of Feminist Modernist Studies titled Feminist Modernist Exiles. We aim to show how women’s ongoing experiences of transnational, transcultural, and translingual experiences in voluntary and involuntary exile continue to generate new forms of feminist cultural production that express their ongoing experiences and responses to political, social, psychological, and cultural upheaval and migration.

Through a wide range of approaches, essays will show how women writers and artists continue to confront and dissolve the gendered definitional and canonical boundaries that constrain women’s creative expressions and responses to their myriad experiences of exile. In addition to such literary genres as fiction and non-fiction, biography, memoir, and poetry, we wish to include interpretations and analyses of women’s multi vocal, fluid, and hybrid forms of modernist expression, including autofiction and poetic nonfiction as well as graphic narratives, the plastic arts, photography, film, and dance.

Situated within historical and geopolitical contexts, essays will represent a range of women’s places and perspectives of origin and immigration to examine how they situate their experiences as historically contingent within the global phenomenon of exile. We are particularly interested to show that, as women have chosen or been forced to move from place to place, their exilic experiences extend across a range of everyday domestic and communal experiences, from working to support themselves and/or their families or contending with government policies. Essays might argue how such existential conditions as national belonging and cultural and gender identity change the meanings of home and exile. Although hardship and tortuous exile experiences persist, this special issue will argue that for modernist women writers and artists, exile, in its multiple, often inconsistent, fluid, and elastic meanings, can also represent opportunity, self-redefinition, and achievement.

Possible topics include:

• Persecution and Expulsion Leading Up To, During, and After War
• Between Mother Tongue, Translation, and the Language of Adaptation
• Refiguring Home and Belonging
• LGBTQ+ and Trans Exile Experiences and Responses
• Everyday Life and Domesticity in Exile
• Philosophical, Cultural, Political, and Psychological Expressions of Exile
• Bodily Expressions of Exile
• Challenges, Hardships, and the Creative Expression of Resilience and Resistance
• Departure and Relocation
• Place and Identity
• Writing in Exile
• Othering
• Diasporic, Cross-Cultural Self-Invention
• Exile and Memory
• Exile and Trauma