CFP: Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology – Sexuality, Capitalism, and Africa/

2nd CFP:

Sexuality, Capitalism, and Africa

Special Issue

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

Guest Editors:
Rafael Winkler (UJ) and
Abraham Olivier (UFH)

Theme:

Friedrich Engels was one of the first authors to relate the critique of capitalism to a sexual politics when he showed, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, that the Western model of the nuclear family performs a central ideological function in the reproduction of capital and class and gender inequality.

Owing to the emergence of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the critique of capitalism by such authors as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Gauttari, and Jean-François Lyotard, to name just these, was embedded in a politics of desire. This is a politics based on the recognition that the social field, including the political institutions of liberalism and the circulation of commodities on the market, is invested with libidinal forces and intensities. From its perspective, the family is not merely a unit of consumption in civil society or the space in which consent to patriarchal norms is manufactured. It is the space where the explosive force of desire is domesticated by means of the Oedipal complex and where a subject, defined by lack, guilt, and the fear of punishment, is produced.

How does capitalist production exploit the forces of desire and the intensities of emotion? To what extent are such forces and intensities destabilizing and disruptive of social identities and of the identity of the system? What kind of fantasies does capitalism produce as substitute means of gratification? What mechanisms, codes, or values does it use to bind and unbind the flow of desire? How are sexual pleasure and the orgasm put in the service of capitalism?

These questions are of particular relevance in a postcolonial context, especially in African countries with emerging economies, in which capitalism, sexism, and racism are receiving increasing critical attention.

This special issue invites contributions that address some of these questions with a focus on developments on the African continent.

Submissions on the following topics are welcome:

•       The fetishism of commodity production;
•       Sexual politics, feminism, identity politics;
•       The social construction of sex, race, gender, and class;
•       The production of post/capitalist subjectivities;
•       Psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt school, and Critical Theory;
•       Nietzsche, Freud, Marx;
•       Western and African socialism;
•       Capitalism and desire in postcolonies and emerging economies

Submission:

If you are interested in submitting an article for publication in the special issue of JBPS, please send an expression of interest to ujphenomenology@gmail.com by Friday the 23rd of February 2018.

Further enquiries can be addressed to Rafael Winkler (Guest Editor) at rwinkler@uj.ac.za, Abraham Olivier (Guest Editor) at aolivier@ufh.ac.za, or Ullrich Haase (Editor-in-Chief) at U.Haase@mmu.ac.uk.