FiMA4 + The Space Between

May 2026

Information coming soon!

Past Conferences

FiMA3: Feminist Provocations

University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS | May 16-18, 2024

The 2024 conference of the Feminist inter/Modernist Association (FiMA) celebrates and
problematizes modernism as a cultural provocation. At times obnoxious and difficult,
erudite and primitive, modernist art works and cultural forms are nothing if not provoking
in their apparently cavalier dismissal of conventional aesthetic, sexual, and cultural
standards. This trolling of conventional middle-class patrons of the arts extended to
conspicuous violations of gender and sexual norms, from Josephine Baker’s cabaret
performances to the gender-bending Eton cut that Laura Doan details in Fashioning
Sapphism to the performative fashion and art of provocateurs like the Baroness Elsa
von Freitag-Loringhoven, Katherine Dunham, Claude Cahun, and Marcel Moore. The
sexual liberation claimed by writers like Djuna Barnes and Radcliffe Hall, and the calling
out of racism and colonialism by writers like Una Marson, Jean Rhys, and Rebecca
West, also provoked and unsettled the patriarchal and imperial establishment, some
well into the postwar years.

We invite explorations of feminist modernism’s many provocations across poetry, fiction,
drama, periodicals, music, art, photography, craft, performance, fashion, and dance. We
encourage feminist examinations of little magazines, slick magazines, independent
presses, and transnational networks and circulations. We seek reconsiderations of the
feminist uses of space and place inside and out of established cultural venues (pop-up
lectures, public events, and street performances). We invite expansive investigations of
multiple modernisms, especially those centering intersectional analyses including race,
class, colonialism, sexuality, genders, geographies, and cultural hierarchies, and we
encourage proposals that stretch the boundaries of “modernism,” in period (1870-1970),
genre, style, and discipline.

We invite individual paper, panel, or roundtable proposals that engage with Provocative
and/or Provoking Literary, Artistic, Performative, and other Cultural Forms situated
between 1870-1970, such as:

Sexual provocations and liberation
“Bad” feminist provocations, both artistically and politically
Feminist demands of radicality and revolution
Black art forms’ movement from margin to center
Climate, Ecology, and the Anthropocene
Embodied provocations: health, reproduction, contraception, dis/ability,
surveillance, imprisonment, technology, pleasure
Agent provocateurs: fighting fascism, racism, and cruel capitalism
Provocative media: photography, film, radio, documentary, visual and plastic arts
Provocative collaborations: friendships, intersectional alliances, organizations
Provoking women: spinsters, witches, lesbians, elders
Provoking affects: anger, rage, irritation, anxiety, animatedness
Provoking the historical record: Archiving women/women as archivists
Provoking literary estates: Archival gate-keeping and literary afterlives
Provoking cultural institutions and their arbiters
Feminist modernist provocations: revising high modernism in light of “Me Too” and Black Lives Matter

Part of FiMA’s mission is to mentor and support graduate students at any level in their
professionalization. FiMA encourages graduate students to propose individual papers
and full panels with fellow graduate students and/or faculty mentors. Please note, this
year, the selection committee will be nominating graduate student proposals for our
“Emergent Voices” Graduate Student Plenary Session. Graduate students chosen
for this session will be mentored and offered the opportunity for a practice panel session
pre-conference. If you are a graduate student and would be interested in being
considered for this session, please indicate so on your individul proposal.

Individual proposals should be 250-300 words and include a working title. Please also
include a short bio.

Panel proposals (3-4 participants) should be no more than 600 words and include a
panel title and working titles. Please also include short bios for each participant.

Rather than reading short papers and running out of time, participants on FiMA
Roundtables (5-6 participants) should provoke conversation about a particular topic
and include room for generative audience participation. Proposals should be no more
than 600 words and include a description of the scope of the roundtable conversation
and short bios for each participant.

FiMA2: Feminist Revolutions, the second Feminist inter/Modernist Association Conference, was canceled due to Covid.

Good news: we turned many of the papers that were to be presented at FiMA2 into articles. The special edition of Feminist Modernist Studies 6.1, “Feminist Publishing Against the Pandemic” was published in March 2023. Click the button below to view and read the issue.

Read FMS 6.1