Christian Noelle Charles, Gesture 1. Screenprint, Varied Editions, 2023. Used with permission.
Call for Submissions
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice
Special Issue: ‘With no mere will to mastery: Practices of Feminist Writing’
Guest edited by Jude Browning
Deadline: 29 June 2024
‘The public address’, such as a lecture or political speech, appears outdated, even anachronistic, when viewed as a single speaker on a stage, behind a lectern, drawing from conventions of traditional Western oratory.
Across time, artists like Aristophanes, Bertolt Brecht, or Prem Sahib have challenged this form and linked public speaking with theatre to expose the underlying operations of language, delivery, and gesture. In what ways can artistic practices make strange and discombobulate these traditional orthodoxies of ‘the public address’?
We welcome articles, visual contributions, interviews and conversations on the theme ‘With no mere will to mastery: Practices of Feminist Writing’. Submissions are sought from artists and artist researchers exploring feminist writing practices involving public expression, postdramatic performance, embodied methods, media, technology, and the global circulation of images. This issue will be guest edited by Dr Jude Browning and published both online and in print by Intellect Books.
The phrase ‘With no mere will to mastery’ is drawn from Adriene Rich’s poem Transcendental Etude (for Michelle Cliff). It contemplates Rich’s call to envision hope not in surpassing mastery, but in striving to ask what new feminist modes of creative production might appear with some ‘resistant political value’?
Public addresses occur wherever people want to share key issues with a larger audience, in almost any setting. Broadsides, radio, religious sermons, Instagram stories, WhatsApp threads, Telegram, message boards, pile-ons, generative AI flooded feeds, algorithms created via doom scrolling, political speeches, rolling news, educational lectures, theatre, protest songs, wearing badges in solidarity, high street soapbox oratory, live updates, corporate announcements, commencement speeches, social activism, community events, celebrity and ceremonial speeches, memorial services. Interpretive texts in museums and exhibitions also demonstrate a controlled use of language for providing supposedly neutral and informative explanations.
Our call for submissions welcomes written responses and provocations examining how the public address is form enacted across modes of speaking and writing (gestural, vernacular, rhetorical, and technologically mediated). Drawing together associated discussions that aim to create opportunities to explore diverse approaches with/in feminist theory, histories, intersectional representations across writing, sound, image, and performance.