The Polish Journal of Aesthetics
68 (1/2023)

Editors: Jana Kukaine (Art Academy of Latvia), Natalia Anna Michna (Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland)

This special issue of The Polish Journal of Aesthetics concentrates on affect theory, postsocialist studies, and intersectional feminism. By merging, subverting, and establishing affinities between these three fields of research, the special issue will fill a gap in ongoing theoretical debates and academic knowledge.

The first blind spot that the upcoming issue attempts to address is Central and Eastern Europe’s under-representation within affect theory, which primarily focuses on exploring Anglo-American contexts or their postcolonial Others. The second question worth considering is the problematic status of feminism itself in affect theory. The historiography of the affective turn (allegedly associated with the turn of the millennia) is often oblivious of the feminist work on emotions and feelings conducted in earlier decades. Thirdly, many researchers regarded postsocialism as a temporal condition of a culturally and geologically marginal region (Europe’s eastern border). However, there are many good reasons to assume that this condition has a global significance with much broader implications. In addition, postsocialist feminism is likewise a marginalized “little sister” of the transnational feminist community, oscillating between its socialist and neoliberal displays.

While suggesting these points of departure, the special issue of the journal invites contributions to illuminate the concept of postsocialist affectivity from the perspective of intersectional feminism.

We invite Authors from various research areas to submit articles that explore:

• the idiosyncratic character of affect in postsocialist contexts, its difference, peculiarity, and obscurity; sensual, carnal, and embodied experiences in Central and Eastern Europe;
• intersectional feminist perspectives on affectivity and the situation of a lived body (for example, poverty, sex work and trafficking, the rebirth of docile femininity, consumerism, etc.);
• the ambiguity of postsocialist affect and its rhizomatic roots, which pass through socialism, communism, neoliberalism, capitalism, nationalism, consumerism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, etc.;
• postosicialst affectivity from gender, queer, environmenal, anti-capitalist, decolonial etc. perspectives;
• other perspectives and approaches that enhance the understanding of what postsocialism feels like and what affects it generates.

Submission deadline: September 30, 2022.