January 20, 2023 Update CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
I am currently working on an edited collection titled Rican Feminisms. Rican Feminisms is an outgrowth of my fundraising and community building efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, called “Feminists for Puerto Rico.” While I am still in the conceptualization and research phase, I am interested in producing an accessible text dealing with questions including: Where are Puerto Rican feminisms in the larger history of liberation movements? How are “rican feminisms” embodied, represented, activated, and challenged? How do we re-member or assemble a distinct Puerto Rican feminist movement when—as colonized subjects—we’ve been separated, minoritized, and expected to disappear? How can we bridge the divides—due to geography, language, and constructions of race, class, and sexuality—that dispossess us of our lineage, of our anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal ancestors?
As a first step in realizing this project, for the 2022 NWSA conference I organized the roundtable “Rican Feminisms: Gathering To Feel Our Presence, To Claim Our Power.” Animated by NWSA’s call to utilize this moment to gather, witness, laugh, cry, rage and hope, in this interdisciplinary workshop on “Rican Feminisms,” participants will come together to discuss the various kinds of feminisms we embody and/or study (Afro-Rican feminisms, queer rican feminisms, boricua feminisms, barrio feminisms, diasporican feminisms, etc.) with a twofold intention: 1) to highlight and outline the contours of contemporary Rican Feminist liberation strategies and 2) to begin developing the community needed to form a brand new interest group—making Rican Feminisms a more visible and viable part of the larger NWSA community moving forward.
Jessica Nydia Pabón, Phd 