Guest Editors: Eva Illouz, Eitan Wilf

The cultural significance of Oprah Winfrey can hardly be overstated. Lee Seigel, a senior editor at the New Republic, wrote recently that “Oprah Winfrey is to television what Bach is to music, Giotto to painting, Joyce to literature.” Time magazine hit the nail on the head when it recently voted her one of the world's handful of "leaders and revolutionaries." Oprah Winfrey has indeed radically transformed the medium of television. But just what exactly she has transformed in it, and how she has done so, remains to be clarified.

The proposition which this special issue would like to explore is that Oprah Winfrey has transformed the mode of insertion of TV within the nooks and crannies of civil society, understood, following the Hegelian tradition, as that space existing between the State, the market, and the family within which actors get freely organized to pursue their values and interests.

These propositions may seem surprising especially in light of the fact that in many intellectual traditions (critical theory, communitarian thought, feminism) television is deemed to corrode the spirit of civil society. Television presumably transforms citizenship into an audience, fragments the public sphere, makes active political participation into passive spectatorship, and distracts us from participating in those organizations most likely to infuse society with democratic values and social trust.

At face value Oprah Winfrey preempts these critiques. Oprah Winfrey’s talk show has given voice to the voiceless and made an important contribution to the politics of visibility. It has called on women to empower themselves and to question their traditional social roles, and most spectacularly, has induced viewers to engage in a wide variety of philanthropic actions. For example, in 1998 Oprah began the Oprah's Angel Network, a charity aimed at encouraging people around the world to make a difference in the lives of underprivileged others. Oprah Winfrey has not only been herself an indefatigable philanthropist, but through television she has induced  viewers to participate in forms of collective action  (e.g., the 2004 show geared toward helping poverty-stricken and AIDS-affected children in Africa).

Yet Oprah Winfrey’s cultural enterprise also challenges our current understanding of civil society. For one, it is firmly embedded in the market and part and parcel of the commodification of private life. Second, where Hegel conceived of civil society as the space opened between the state and the family, the Oprah Winfrey Talk Show has drawn a straight line between the family and the public sphere, seeming to make the latter ancillary to the former. Finally, Oprah Winfrey mixes together the collectively important issues with the frivolous, thus threatening to render the public sphere cacophonic and civil society meaningless.

We are soliciting papers which can reflect on the multiple and contradictory aspects of Oprah Winfrey’s insertion in civil society and on the ways in which it is embedded within performativity.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit manuscripts electronically as email attachments in Microsoft Word. All emails should be addressed to Eva Illouz, at illouz@mscc.huji.ac.il , and Eitan Wilf, at ewilf@uchicago.edu . Essays should be double-spaced, with 1-inch margins; articles should not exceed 10,000 words. Please follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. All manuscripts should be submitted with a 500 word abstract. Submissions due no later than May 15, 2007.

Women and Performance is the only peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to the conjuncture of feminist theory and performance studies. Established in 1983, the journal continues to affirm its commitment to feminist writing, and to extend and reformulate notions of performance and performativity so as to advance, challenge and reinvent critical debates on gender and sexuality. The editorial collective invites submissions of scholarly essays on performance, visual and sound art, theater, dance, ritual, political manifestations, film, new media, and the performance of everyday life from interdisciplinary feminist perspectives. We also welcome performative texts, suggestions for themed issues and recommendations on books and performances for review.

Submissions

The Editorial Collective of Women and Performance invites the submission of manuscripts; interviews; book, performance, and film reviews; poetry; photo essays and images; and performance excepts that advance critical dialogues on gender and performance.  We accept scholarship that is interdisciplinary and provocative in method and form. 

Submissions are accepted for special, themed issues and for general issues.  Once received, submissions are vetted by the editorial collective and sent for peer review.  We provide reader comments and occasionally work with authors to improve their writing for publication.  We make every effort to respond to submissions within three months. 

Please submit manuscripts electronically, as attachments in Microsoft Word, to Jeanne Vaccaro, Managing Editor (contact info is here ).

1. All work should be double spaced, with 1-inch margins, in 12-point Times font.
   
2. Scholarly essays should not exceed 10,000 words; reviews should be approximately 1,000 words. 
3. Writers should follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. 
4. All manuscripts must be submitted with a separate cover document – including author’s name, address, email, phone number; a brief bio, no longer than 2-3 sentence (indicating title, recent publications); a 200 word abstract; and a word count of the manuscript.  To protect the anonymity of the submission process, please avoid listing your name anywhere in the body of the manuscript. 
5. Please title your attachment with your last name, for example: title the manuscript as YourLastName.doc, the cover letter as YourLastNameCover.doc, and any images as YourLastNameImage1.pdf and YourLastNameImage2.pdf. 
6. You are welcome to submit images along with your manuscript; however, please ensure that you have (or will) secure copyright protection for all images.  Women and Performance cannot aid in, or financially contribute to, the procuring of copyright.