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CALL FOR PAPERS 5 – POLITICS AND MYSTICISM IN WOMEN’S SPEECH

 

What political potentials can be brought into light from the interiority of female mysticism? How can the echoes of obscurity sublate the ideas of progress, productivity, and consumption? Why does the mystical so often seem to aim at the material?

This issue of the international and intersectional journal Anthropology & Materialism seeks to explore the tension between political engagement and mystical interiority in women’s writings, from the Middle Ages to the present. Beginning with Claire Démar’s manifesto Ma loi d’avenir (1833), in which the figure of the “femme-messie” emerges, the issue invites reflection on how women’s speech and thought have articulated social utopia, mystical experience, and the will to political transformation.

The questions addressed in this issue will concern the tensions between mysticism and politics within feminine thought, speech, and action. How might we approach, at the dawn of these tensions, utopian movements that mobilized women, such as the Beguines, medieval female mysticism, Saint-Simonianism and Fourierism, the Romantics, female Vormärz activists, Marxists, or, in our own time, ecofeminism?

We welcome contributions focusing on individual figures (e.g. Simone Weil, María Zambrano), collective movements (Beguines, Saint-Simonians, Romantics, Marxists, ecofeminists, etc.), or thematic approaches. Unpublished translations of texts shedding new light on the theme are also encouraged.

Contributions are welcome in English, French, German, or Spanish.

For more information and submission guidelines, click here.

 


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
juliajankowska (November 6, 2025). CALL FOR PAPERS 5 – POLITICS AND MYSTICISM IN WOMEN’S SPEECH. ANTHROPOLOGICAL MATERIALISM. Retrieved January 12, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/153n4


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