Volume 4, Issue 1 (Autumn 2024 / Winter 2025)
Call for Papers
THEME: Women and Water: the Flow of Matriculture
Deadline for abstract submission: 31 May 2023 NOW CLOSED
The relationship of women with water is deep, flowing among and between cultures as disparate as the Anishnaabeg of eastern Canada, the Celtic people of Europe, and the Ashanti of western Africa. This issue of Matrix seeks to explore that relationship. We are looking for articles which, among other things, describe women’s ritual behaviour in relation to water, the ways in which water affects women’s lives and experiences, the cultural stories and views which inform their relationship.
Today, there is a heightened knowledge of the preciousness of water to human life. Is the special relationship to water some cultures attribute to women connected to our wombs as the matrix of life, particularly to menstruation and the uterine liquids in which embryos swim? Or are there other reasons buried deep in myth and storytelling which explicate a special ritual relationship? What are women’s ritual responses, for example, to water pollution? What is the role of the moon when considering women and water? We are interested in exploring the cultural roots and contemporary shapes of the importance of water to women’s lives.
We encourage research about women’s rites of passage using water, water-based rituals or ceremonies, water festivals, and seasonal honourings, showing how they are centered in women’s identities and cultural roles, within their creation stories, and their life teachings.
We also encourage creative artworks (any media) and community contributions which focus on the relationship between women and water, women and the moon, and/or women, water, and the moon. Personal essays or reflections on the theme are also welcome.
Possibilities for papers include yet are not limited to the following. Don’t be limited by our imaginations!
- Myths and stories about women and water
- Rituals and ceremonies concerning water done by women
- Culturally-affirming relationship between oceans, seas, rivers, ponds, or other natural bodies of water and women
- Speical relationships associating the moon, water, and women
- Economic consequences of women's associations with water
- Historical instances of wmen's preeminent relationship with water
- Cultural associations of women, menses, birth-giving, and water
Issue Editors: Editorial Collective of Matrix
Please submit a 300-word abstract (max) to the Editorial Collective of Matrix: A Journal for Matricultural Studies.
Submission via email to: Linnéa Rowlatt, Managing Editor, at lrowlatt@networkonculture.ca or to the Editorial Collective at info@networkonculture.ca (subject line: Matrix Vol 4, Issue 1)
Deadline for abstract submission: 31 May 2023
About Matrix
Matrix: A Journal for Matricultural Studies is an online, open access, peer-reviewed and refereed journal published by the International Network for Training, Education, and Research on Culture (Network on Culture), Canada.
For many years, scholarship has explored the expression and role of women in culture from various perspectives such as kinship, economics, ritual, etc, but so far, the idea of approaching culture as a whole, taking the female world as primary, as a cultural system in Geertz’ classical sense of the term – a matriculture – has gone unnoticed. Some cultures have a weakly defined matricultural system; others have strong matricultural systems with various ramifications that may include, but are not limited to, matrilineal kinship, matrilocality, matriarchal governance features – all of which have serious consequences relative to the socio-cultural status of women, men, children, and the entire community of humans, animals, and the environment.
The main objective of Matrix is to provide a forum for those who are working from this theoretical stance. We encourage submissions from scholars, community members, and other knowledge keepers from around the world who are ready to take a new look at the ways in which people - women and men, historically and currently - have organized themselves into meaningful relationships; the myths, customs, and laws which support these relationships; and the ways in which researchers have documented and perhaps mis-labeled the matricultures they encounter.
For more information, visit our website: https://www.networkonculture.ca/activities/matrix
