CFPs

CFP – Free Palestine!: Voices of Decolonization // Deadline: Rolling

Refugees in Their Own Homeland by Mohamed El Metmari, CC licensed.

Though there has been an eruption of horrific violence in Gaza over the past weeks, this violence comes in the wake of decades of Israeli occupation, and Israeli, British, and US colonialism (Khalidi 2020). Yet the meta-narratives about this occupation have often been overwhelmingly told through the lens of Israeli officials, the IDF (Israeli “Defense” Force or as it is more adequately framed IOF – Offense Force), and their powerful allies. 

This special issue focuses on responses to the ongoing violence and occupation of Palestine. Throughout the occupation of Palestine and the genocide in Gaza, the circulation of information that covers the egregious acts of violence remains cloudy and difficult to trace and verify. The violence of continuing occupation as well as the inability of journalists to tell stories from the ground has resulted in the dissemination of conflicting, misleading, and false reporting, while many news media outlets and politicians limit the terms in which Israeli-Palestinian relations can even be discussed, using Israeli-apologist language couched in terms of “conflict,” “war,” “peace,” claims of anti-semitism, and blatant Islamophobia. Much of the coverage of the genocide of Palestinian people has been documented through social media by journalists such as @motaz_azaiza and @aymanalgedi12, and many other Palestinians, who risk their lives remaining  in Gaza under extremely dangerous circumstances. 

This CFP invites short responses (of around 500 to 3000 words) to existing cultural content on the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Palestine. Submissions can be in the form of short essays, reflections, visual art, poetry, creative nonfiction, multimedia, sound, video, interviews, or a combination thereof, and will be reviewed on an ongoing basis. Submissions will not be peer-reviewed but will be read carefully by our editorial team. 

Submissions might consider the following themes:

• The “fog of war” or the “information war”
• Pinkwashing and co-opting of LGBTQ language by Israel
• Disability justice and genocide 
• Queer liberation and Palestine
• The destruction of Land, bodies, culture, and non-human kin
• Petrocultures and occupation of Gaza
• Social media and alternative forms of reporting or information dissemination 
• Responses to specific news stories/coverage
• Highlighting of specific events
• Discussions of settler colonization and decolonization efforts
• Cultural content creation by Palestinians and their allies
• Poetry, art, music, dance, and research as intervention 
• Government and official and state-backed rhetoric on the violence by world leaders
• Censorship of pro-Palestinian views (particularly Canadian, US, German, and Western European censorship)
• Journalistic and editorial standards and rhetorics that limit and dictate language choice and occlude genocide, apartheid, and occupation through use of so-called “neutral” and absolving language
• Celebrity responses 
• Censorship by and at universities
• Solidarity, coalition, and reparations 
• Indigenous, Black, Muslim, Of Color, and Jewish solidarity with Palestine
• Police and military enforcement and arms manufacture between the US, Israel, and other nations
• Masculinity, femininity, childhood, and genocide in Gaza, the West Bank, and in representations thereof 
• Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions
• Children’s literature on Palestine and the attack on Palestinian childhood
• Transnational networks of support and resistance

Contributors are encouraged to engage with Palestinian-authored and -allied content, including social media, journalism, art, literature, film, and theory, including but not limited to the following:

• Books and resources listed here by @palipunk
• Books and resources listed by Librarians and Archivists with Palestine: https://librarianswithpalestine.org/archives-syllabus/ 
• Queers in Palestien statement: https://queersinpalestine.noblogs.org/post/2023/11/19/no-pride-with-genocide/
• Pluto Press reading list: https://www.plutobooks.com/free-palestine-reading-list/
• Verso Books reading list: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/5078-palestinian-solidarity-reading-list
• Haymarket Books reading list: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/71-free-palestine-a-reading-list 
• The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
• Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear by Mosar Abu Toha
• Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique by Sa’ed Atshan
• Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History by Nur-eldeen Masalha
• Palestinian Identity by Rashid Khalidi
• Fragmented Bodies “Dancing on the Spot:” The Transnational Lives of Canadian Muslims and the Limits of Anti-Islamophobia Advocacy by Wafaa Hasan and Zarah Khan
• We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders: A Memoir of Love and Resistance by Linda Sarsour
• Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa
• The Twenty-Ninth Year by Hala Alyan
• The Parisian by Isabella Hammad
• Israel/Palestine and the Queer International by Sarah Schulman
• Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism and Palestine by Nada Elia
• You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat
• Orientalism by Edward Said
• Israeli Apartheid:  A Beginner’s Guide by Ben White
• One State by Ghada Karmi
• Settler Colonialism: An Introduction by Sai Englert
• Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions by Omar Barghouti
• Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel by Azad Essa
• Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis
• Hollow Land by Eyal Weizman
• Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani
• The Presence of Absence: A River Dies of Thirst by Mahmoud Darwish
• My Garden Over Gaza by Sarah Musa
• They Called me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl’s Fight for Freedom by Dena Takruri, Ahed Tamimi
• Sitti’s Bird: A Gaza Story by Malak Mattar
• You are the Color by Rifk Ebeid, Hajera Khaja, and Noor Alshalabi 
• Sitti’s Olive Trees by Ndaa Hassan Soumbai Qureshi
• These Olive Trees by Aya Ghanameh
• Sitti’s Key by Sahar Khader Ali and Noor Alshalabi
• Colours of Al-Quds by Jenny Molendyk Divleli
• Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine by Hannah Moushabeck
• Baba, What does my Name Mean? By Rifk Ebeid and Lamaa Jawhari

CFP Issue 15 – BLACK BRITISH FEMINISMS AND PERFORMANCE // Abstract Deadline: April 1, 2024

Image by Hulki Okan Tabak from Pixabay.

A decade of austere and xenophobic rhetoric has culminated in a “hostile environment” in Britain that attempts to restrict access to public spaces and services of public interest for people who are minoritised by, race, gender, and sexuality. For Black British feminists, creativity remains an important tool for resisting the past, present and, futures of these oppressions in British spaces (Gayle 2020).

This special issue aims to explore the ways in which Black British women, cis and trans, use performance, be that through music, theatre or other creative art forms, to respond to the silencing and erasure that they experience. Through performance, Black women can vocalise their grievances, affirm their presence, and articulate their reality (Bryan, Dadzie and Scafe 2018; Mosley 2021). For some Black women, performance generates space to evoke a Black aesthetic which makes visible ways to live through struggle (Smalls and Powell 2019). In this way, performers engage with issues of race, space, and place to reclaim Black women’s past, present and futures in often hostile British spaces. This “feminist work” explores and illustrate ways that Black women are positioned by racist and heterosexist discourses (Goddard 2007).

For this special issue on “Black British feminisms and performance”, guest editors Parise Carmichael-Murphy and Lorna French, invite contributors to celebrate performance as part of Black women’s “intellectual production” (Nash 2018). In response to Christina Sharpe’s (2016) call to become “undisciplined,” this special issue will lean into ways that Black British feminisms are, and have been, expressed through performance to resist legibility and affirm Black women’s lives in Britain. This is evident in the ways that Black women singers, playwrights, MCs, poets, dancers, and other performers challenge the silences imposed on them, ultimately working to make their experiences audible, visible, or felt.

The guest editors welcome contributors that explore ways that performance can hold space for Black women’s embodied experience and discursive resistance. We encourage contributors to submit shorter creative pieces or cultural commentaries that may provoke or intervene. Contributors are also encouraged to mess with disciplinarity and submit pieces that blur the lines between the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Therefore, in addition to full length articles of no more than 7000 words, we welcome up to 3000-word contributions of: poetry and prose, interviews or “in conversations,” media reviews, collages and artwork, annotated playlists and lyrics, short cultural commentaries, photo-essays, visual and sound art, short films, or a combination of these. We welcome submissions from students, artists, activists, cultural creators, and established academics.

Topics for exploration might include:

• Black British feminisms and resistance in music, theatre, and literature
• Resistance of dominant discourse by playwrights, theatre makers, musicians and songwriters
• Constructions of Black British identity and Black British feminisms through performance
• Creative responses to attempts to silence or erase Black British women and feminisms
• Black women’s strategies for affirming their place in hostile British spaces
• Expressions of Black womanhood and Black British feminism
• Imaginative and creative outputs that disturb the boundaries of racialised sexuality and gender

To submit, please send a 250-word abstract and 100-word biography to guest editors Parise Carmichael-Murphy and Lorna French at BBFandPerformance[at]gmail.com by April 1, 2024, making sure to cc Feral Feminisms at feralfeminisms[at]gmail.com.

For detailed submission guidelines, visit http://www.feralfeminisms.com/submission-guidelines/. Please prepare your submissions using Chicago author date, following the style carefully so as to show respect and cut back on labor for the volunteer editorial staff. Submissions that do not carefully follow this style will not be considered out of consideration for volunteer-based editorial staff. Feral Feminisms only considers submissions that are not previously published or under review at other journals. Contributors retain the copyright of their pieces under Creative Commons licensing.

Anticipated timeline:
CFP for abstracts closes: April 1, 2024
Editorial responses: May 2024
Full pieces due: October 2024
Peer Review: October to February 2025 (estimated)
Edited pieces due back with guest editors: June 2025
Copyediting: June and July 2025
Launch: late Summer/Fall 2025

About the Guest Editors:
Parise Carmichael-Murphy is completing a PhD in Education at the University of Manchester. She is a member of the Feminist Review editorial collective, and is passionate about celebrating Black British feminisms, identity, music, and culture. She is @Parise_CM on X (formerly Twitter).

Lorna French is completing her PhD in Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. She is a playwright who won the Alfred Fagon Award in 2006 and 2016. Lorna is committed to exploring Black British feminisms, race, gender, playwriting, and dramaturgy. She is @LornaFr on X (formerly Twitter).

References
Bryan, Beverley, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scafe. 2018. Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain. London: Verso.

Gayle, Rita. 2020. “Creative Futures of Black (British) Feminism in Austerity and Brexit Times.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 45, no. 3: 525–528.

Goddard, Lynette. 2007. Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mosley, Angela M. 2021. “Women Hip-Hop Artists and Womanist Theology.” Religions 12, no. 12: 1063.

Nash, Jennifer C. 2018. Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality. Durham: Duke University Press.

Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press.

Smalls, Shanté P, and Elliot H. Powell. 2019. “Introduction: an ImPossibility: Black Queer and Trans* Aesthetics.” The Black Scholar 49, no. 1: 1–5.

CFP Issue 14 – Feminist Forms of Submission // Abstract Deadline: Closed

As a submissive lesbian and textile artist whose arts practice and research is rooted in exploring queer BDSM, kink dynamics, queer identity, and their intersection with feminisms, I consistently come across the question, “how can people who identify as submissive (or a sub) also be feminist?”

There are a lot of misconceptions about the kink community in general; “BDSM is still, whether explicitly stated or quietly believed, regularly assumed to be sick, freaky, deviant, wrong…” (Scott 2015, 12). These misconceptions are especially disseminated by anti-sex positive narratives and ideologies, which attempt to perpetuate the idea that women-identifying and gender non-conforming submissives have somehow been coerced into submission by trying to paint “an exposé of exploitation, abuse, and objectification” (Rosewarne 2011, 167).

However, this limited understanding of submission is the furthest from the truth. Holistic Dom(me)/sub dynamics are based on ongoing consent, communicated and respected boundaries, and the exploration of pleasure for all parties involved. Kink is an act of queering sex “since it ritualizes modern gays and lesbians into a transgressive transaction that is about ecstasy and ruin” (Geczy and Karaminas 2013, 99). The study of BDSM and kink are, therefore, inherently queer ways of engaging in intimacy and critically exploring queer sexuality studies. BDSM and kink are also deeply embedded in queer culture and identity, such as the queer leather community. Ariane Cruz furthers this from both a queer theory and Black feminist theory lens, discussing how BDSM and pornography are an expression of “the power, agency, and pleasure, albeit highly conflicted, that they engender for black women” (Cruz 2016, 20).

The goal of this special issue is to uplift and represent a true understanding of submission and create more accurate representations of submission in the face of current misunderstandings that academia and mainstream culture have of the queer kink community. For this special issue on “Feminist Forms of the Submission” the guest editor, Deanna Armenti, invites explorations of submission as it relates to or interacts with a variety of themes, which may include (but are not limited to):

• Decolonizing and Indigenous approaches to submission
• Critical race perspectives on femininity and submission
• Postcolonial theory and femininity and submission
• Practice-based, interdisciplinary expressions of submission, kink, and BDSM
• Submission as a spiritual, intimate personal and interpersonal experience
• Experiences and thoughts on subspace
• Auto-ethnographic and personal experiences with submission and being a sub (submissive)
• Queer subs/submission, kink/BDSM experiences
• Gender expression and submission (non-binary, gender fluid, gender non-conforming, and trans experiences)
• Affect and embodiment theory intersecting with Queer Studies and kink/BDSM

Submission Instructions:
Special issue contributions may include:

• Full-length theoretical essays (5000 – 7000 words max)
• Shorter creative pieces, cultural commentaries, personal narratives, or auto-ethnographies (500 – 2500 words)
• Poetry, photo-essays, short films/video (uploaded to Vimeo), visual (jpeg) and sound art, or a combination of forms.

To submit, include the following:

• 100-word abstract on a Word document by October 15th, 2023
• 60-word author biography on a separate Word document, including your IG handle (if you have one/want to share) and a link to your website (if you have one/want to share)
• Please send abstracts and inquiries to guest editor Deanna Armenti at deanna[dot]armenti[at]torontomu[dot]ca, making sure to cc Feral Feminisms at feralfeminisms[at]gmail[dot]com
• For detailed submission guidelines, visit http://www.feralfeminisms.com/submission-guidelines/. Please prepare your submissions using Chicago author date, following the style carefully so as to show respect and cut back on labor for the volunteer editorial staff. Submissions not closely following Chicago author-date cannot be considered.
• Feral Feminisms only considers submissions that are not previously published or under review at other journals. Contributors retain the copyright of their pieces under Creative Commons licensing.

Anticipated Submission Timeline:

• Abstract Due Date: October 15th, 2023
• 1^st Draft Due Date: January 31st, 2024
• Final Draft Due Date: Summer 2024

About the Guest Editor:

Deanna Armenti (She/Fae) is a Queer Genderfae poet, zine creator, and textile researcher. Deanna recently completed the Fashion Master’s program at Toronto Metropolitan and will be continuing at TMU in the Media and Design Innovation PhD program having received the Ontario Graduate Scholarship for her first year of study.

Deanna’s research is practice-based and explores queer, kink identities through the lens of embodiment and affect to investigate the queer erotic form. She seeks to combat the pathologization and stigmatization of the queer kink community through demystifying the lifestyle. Her creation of accessible material installations is an embodied practice which invites folks to engage with the community. Deanna’s research focuses on queer temporalities, seeking liminal spaces and ‘slices in time’ as a means of conveying the non-linear spectrum of queerness. She also explores the community’s use of signaling as semiotics, investigating alternate forms of communication such as sign based discourse.

Deanna has editorial assistant experience, having worked with the open access journal Fashion Studies during her Master’s degree. Her article “Subspace: An Internal and Liminal Place” is currently under review for Volume 5, Issue 1 of Fashion Studies. Deanna also curates her own publication, The Sapphic Printing Press, which publishes queer writers worldwide in a collaborative zine called SAPPHIC. Her creative writing has received publication in zines such as Feels Zine, Carousel Collective, and Sinister Wisdom. Her poetry zine I Know My Own Heart was nominated for best Litzine at the Broken Pencil 2022 zine awards.

References

Cruz, Ariane. 2016. The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography. New York: New York University Press.

Geczy, Adam, and Vicki Karaminas. 2013. Queer Style. London: Bloomsbury Education.

Rosewarne, Lauren. 2011. Part-Time Perverts: Sex, Pop Culture, and Kink Management. London: Bloomsbury.

Scott, Catherine. 2015. Thinking Kink: The Collision of BDSM, Feminism and Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Books.

CFP Issue 13 – Excess: The Intersections of Critical Femininities, Mad Studies, and Critical Disabilities // Abstract Deadline: Closed

“Excess” has been conceptualized in various ways: it is the grammar of camp style; the signifier of capitalism; the name of inequality; and a warning of environmental collapse. “Excess” is the abject and the affective—those feelings, affects and embodiments that “spill over,” which exceed white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, ableist, sanist, and cissexist frameworks of recognition or normative logics of acceptability. Queer and racialized sexualities, bodies, knowledges, and affects are read as “too much”—hypersexualized, objectified, and pathologized (Albrecht-Samarasinha, 1997; Allen, 1992; Collins, 2005; Musser, 2018; Nestle, 1992); white bodies are marked as Other, as excessive, when they gain weight, have queer sex, or act without middle-class decorum (Brown, 2005; Dominguez, 2015; Walker, 2001). Insofar as femininity, and femme, are excessively embodied, excessively artificial, and excessively emotional, “excess” is the charge against femininity—and some femininities more than others. We contend that a critical femininities framework—which moves beyond accounts of femininity as a site of patriarchal control to unhinge femininity from “woman” and “female” and understand the feminine as a site and form of knowledge (Dahl 2012)—foregrounds the ways that “excess” and practices of exceeding are mobilized by marginalized communities as strategies of resistance, survival, and celebration, including “brown jouissance” (Musser 2018) and “queer of color camp” (Dominguez 2015). A critical femininities framework can be mobilized to frame the politics of excess as potentially emancipatory, opening up the possibilities of queer femme futurities, pleasures, protests, and practices of care (Brushwood Rose & Camillieri 2002; Dawson 2017; Hollibaugh 2000; McCann 2018; Nestle 1992; Schwartz 2016, 2018, 2020; Volcano & Dahl 2008). 

Simultaneously, “excess” is weaponized as pathology and immorality against historically marginalized groups, including women, queers, the disabled, Mad, and racialized (Russo 1995; Skelly 2014; Musser 2018). Jane Skelly writes that “like decadence, the term ‘excess’ has often been used to shame and/or control that which threatens the social order” (2018, 4): the excessively embodied, excessively emotional, and excessively abject—those traits so closely and consistently reified as feminine and Mad—only exist in relation to the norms they transgress (Russo 1995; Skelly 2014; Skelly 2018). Situating an intersectional critical femininities framework in conversation with Mad and critical disability scholarship invites new engagements with the pathologization of feminized forms of Madness and psychiatric disabilities (Chesler 2005; Johnson 2015, 2021; Kafai 2013, 2021; Mollow 2006, 2014; Shaw and Proctor 2005; Showalter 1987; Ussher 1992) and highlights potential scholarly and activist coalitions between Mad studies and femme theory. We invite examinations of the possibilities and limits of a framework of “excess” through the lenses of critical femininities, Mad studies, and critical disabilities. To render “excess” a theoretical terrain of analysis also invites scholarly coalitions between Mad studies, femme theory, racialization, and, for example, Blackness (Bruce 2021; Pickens 2019). 

For this special issue on “Excess,” the guest editors Andi Schwartz and Shayda Kafai invite explorations of excess as it relates to or interacts with a variety of themes, which may include (but are not limited to):

• Decolonizing engagements with femininities
• Postcolonial engagements with femininities
• Critical race perspectives on femininity, Madness, and excess
• Critical femininities and the disciplining power(s) of excess (e.g. as pathology, diagnosis, criminality, or abjection)
• Mad/femme communities and Mad/femme assemblages
• Femme aesthetics and camp
• Feminization of poverty in late-stage capitalism
• Critical femininity perspectives on bodies and bodyminds in excess (e.g. Fat studies, Mad studies, critical disability and Crip theory perspectives)
• The affective dimensions of “excess”
• Excess as pedagogy, method, or epistemology
• Reclaiming “excess” from marginalized perspectives
• Pleasure, playfulness, and excess
• Excess as detriment, inequality, or other critical perspectives on excess

We welcome submissions in the form of scholarly papers as well as ruminations on excess that “exceed” the boundaries of academia, including:

• Visual art
• Video art or video of performance art
• Photographs and photo essays
• Poetry and creative writing
• Other creative, hybrid, and collaborative submissions

Submission Instructions:

Special issue contributions may include:

• Full-length theoretical essays (5000 – 7000 words)
• Shorter creative pieces, cultural commentaries, personal narratives, or auto-ethnographies (500 – 2500 words)
• Poetry, photo-essays, short films/video (uploaded to Vimeo), visual (jpeg) and sound art, or a combination of forms.

To submit, include the following:

• 100-word abstract on a Word document by December 7, 2022
• 60-word author biography on a separate Word document, including your IG handle (if you have one/want to share) and a link to your website (if you have one/want to share)
• Please send abstracts and inquiries to guest editors Andi Schwartz and Shayda Kafai at excessspecialissue[at]gmail[dot]com, making sure to cc Feral Feminisms at feralfeminisms[at]gmail[dot]com
• For detailed submission guidelines, visit http://www.feralfeminisms.com/submission-guidelines/. Please prepare your submissions using Chicago author date, following the style carefully so as to show respect and cut back on labor for the volunteer editorial staff. Feral Feminisms only considers submissions that are not previously published or under review at other journals. Contributors retain the copyright of their pieces under Creative Commons licensing.

Submission Timeline:

• Abstract Due Date: December 7, 2022
• 1^st Draft Due Date: April 3, 2023
• Final Draft Due Date: August 7, 2023

About the Guest Editors:

Dr. Andi Schwartz is the Coordinator of the Centre for Feminist Research at York University, where she organizes the Critical Femininities Research Cluster, the Femme Scholars Series, and the annual Critical Femininities conference. Andi has a PhD and MA in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies from York University, and a Bachelor of Journalism from Carleton University. Her academic work has been published in Punk and Post Punk, Feminist Media Studies, Social Media + Society, First Monday, Feral Feminisms, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology, and others. Andi lives in Toronto with her dogs.

Dr. Shayda Kafai is (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Ethnic and Women’s Studies department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. As a queer, disabled, Mad femme of color, she commits to practicing the many ways we can reclaim our bodyminds from systemic oppressions. Shayda’s writing and speaking presentations focus on intersectional body politics, particularly on how bodies are constructed and how they hold the capacity for rebellion. She is the author of Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice and Art Activism of Sins Invalid (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021).

Celebrating Ace and Aro Authors Section of Feral Feminisms // Deadline: Closed

Feral Feminisms is looking for book reviews of work by asexual (ace) and/or aromantic (aro) authors. If you know of an academic monograph, popular book, edited collection, poetry book, podcast series, novel, art series, zine, film, blog, or work in another medium created by an ace and/or aro creator or foregrounding topics relevant to ace and/or aro readers that you would like to celebrate, we invite you to send an email to the Editors at feralfeminisms[at]gmail[dot]com with the subject heading “Ace & Aro Book Review Proposal.” Please include a 2-5 sentence description of what you would like to review and why in the body of the email. In the spirit of opening up what form a book review can take, we invite you to think of the book review broadly conceived including as an interview with the author or as a personal engagement and in mediums other than text (i.e., audio, video). Reviews in standard book review format of up to 750 words are also welcome. Reviewers will be featured in the “Celebrating Ace and Aro Authors” section of an upcoming Feral Feminisms issue. Deadline for review proposals is December 15, 2021 with the reviews themselves due on January 20, 2022. Keep a look-out for future book review calls!

Celebrating Indigenous Authors Section of Feral Feminisms // Deadline: Closed

Feral Feminisms is looking for book reviews of work by Indigenous authors. If you know of an academic monograph, edited collection, poetry book, podcast series, novel, art series, or film created by an Indigenous creator that you would like to celebrate, we invite you to send an email to the Editors at feralfeminisms[at]gmail[dot]com with the subject heading “Book Review Proposal.” Please include a 3-5 sentence description of what you would like to review and why in the body of the email. In the spirit of opening up what form a book review can take, we invite you  to think of the book review broadly conceived including as an interview with the author or as a personal engagement and in mediums other than text (i.e., audio, video). Reviews in standard book review format of up to 750 words are also welcome. Reviewers will receive a copy of the book they will be reviewing and their review will be featured in the “Celebrating Indigenous Authors” section of an upcoming Feral Feminisms issue. Deadline for review proposals is April 1st, 2021 with the reviews themselves due on September 1st, 2021. Keep a look-out for future book review calls!

CFP Issue 10 – Do-It-Together (DIT): Hacking the Anthropocene   // CLOSED. Thanks to all who submitted.

Please send inquiries and submissions to the guest editorial collective addressed to Hayley Singer at hackingtheanthropocene[at]gmail[dot]com, making sure to cc Feral Feminisms at feralfeminisms[at]gmail[dot]com.

The Anthropocene is a name coined for the emerging geological era in which humans are viewed as the dominant planetary force. Intended to evoke ecological concern, it draws on settler colonial discourse, problematically homogenizes all humans as planet destroyers and implies that we are locked into these petrifying ways of being. As a colonial figure and inheritance, the Anthropocene is articulated as a teleological story-arc that jettisons “us all” towards apocalypse but fails to interrogate which humans drive and benefit from ecological degradation. It fails to consider that social systems, rather than human nature, are the cause of such degradation. It figures and normalizes the privileged white cis-male as the epitome of human-ness. 

Building on the intellectual work of Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Hamilton, we believe that queer, feminist, anti-colonial artists, scholars, and activists are needed to “hack” the Anthropocene. To hack can mean to cut up, damage or mutilate; to cope; to gain unauthorized access; to cough up and expel something you need to be rid of; to find shortcuts or tricks; to intervene or repurpose. And of course, a hack can be dull or a “has-been.” The Anthropocene has been proposed as a scientific fact, but it is also overflowing with science fictions and speculative fabulations. Hacking the Anthropocene calls artists, writers, activists, scientists, and beings of all kinds to decompose, reform, infiltrate, eject, co-opt or differently (re)configure the notion of Homo destroyer such that our shared-but-different futures might be configured and “imagined otherwise” (Heath Justice, 2012).   

At the 2019 Hacking the Anthropocene IV Symposium, we invited artists, activists, students and established academics to unpick the ramifications of “DIY or die” stories for the naturecultures that make up Earth’s contexts and relations, proposing “DIT”— Do-It-Together—as a theme. This invitation for submissions is extended to both those who presented or attended Hacking the Anthropocene IV, but also to anyone and everyone else. So! This is a rallying cry for you (plural) to help us continue asking: how might we Hack the Anthropocene together? We invite contributors to collectively ask: 

• What does it mean to strive for collective action when queer, Indigenous, anticolonial, and posthumanist artists, scholars, and activists have so deeply problematized the anthropocentrism underpinning taken-for-granted colonial understandings of both collectives and agency? 
• Who can hack the Anthropocene? We are questioning what counts as a subject (Individuals? More-than-humans? Non-humans? Systems? Relationships?) and which ones have been included, excluded, privileged, marginalized, centred, invisibilized, heard, or ignored?
• What strategies are being used to “Indigenize the Anthropocene” (Todd, 2015)? 
• How might emergent Indigenous and settler relations be navigated through environmental activism, art, and scholarship? 
• What forms of collectives are needed, and how can “we” compose such collectives? Are such collectives already emerging, and if so, how might we come to know of, support, and/or participate in them—given they may be disregarded by Anthropocentric values, knowledges, and storytelling practices? 
• How might sameness and difference be managed within such collectives?
• How do collectives cross borders? 
• What methods are being used to work with those who are displaced or incarcerated? 

Your submission: 

• Can be a film, a photo essay, a poem, a fingery theory (Hayward, 2010), a feral story, tips or guidance, a collaborative essay, or something else entirely (we accept and encourage all kinds of multi-modal creative-critical responses).
• Offers a response, a complication, or a multiplication to the notion of DIT. 
• Is mindful of citational politics. 
• Engages issues of the following: animal-human-ecological-vegetal-microbial-geological-cyborg relations. We ask that you follow (or push) these in surprising directions. 

“Do-It-Together (DIT): Hacking the Anthropocene” is guest edited by Hayley Singer along with an editorial collective comprised of Anna Dunn, Blanche Verlie, Stephanie Lavau, and Tessa Laird and with Feral Feminisms’ team. 

We invite you to listen to the following playlist to get inspired. 

Submission Instructions: Please send inquiries and submissions to the guest editorial collective addressed to Hayley Singer at hackingtheanthropocene[at]gmail[dot]com, making sure to cc Feral Feminisms at feralfeminisms[at]gmail[dot]com. The deadline is May 31, 2020 to submit completed pieces. Submitted contributions may include full-length theoretical essays (5000 – 7000 words), shorter creative pieces, cultural commentaries, personal narratives or auto-ethnographies (500 – 2500 words), poetry, photo-essays, short films/video (uploaded to Vimeo), visual (jpeg) and sound art, or a combination of forms. In addition to the completed piece, please also send a 60-word author biography and 100-word abstract as one separate Word document. For more detailed submission guidelines, visit http://www.feralfeminisms.com/submission-guidelines/. Please prepare your submissions using Chicago author date. Feral Feminisms only considers submissions that are not previously published or under review at other journals. Contributors retain the copyright of the pieces under Creative Commons licensing.

Publications Access Policy: In the interest of making access to information more free, to challenge commercial publishing, and to encourage authors with limited or no institutional access to draw on academic journals and databases, Feral Feminisms editors will facilitate access to necessary journal articles, book chapters, and books when possible for potential or current authors. If authors need specific manuscripts to complete drafting or revising their pieces, please contact the editors, who will do everything we can to ensure you have access to those materials.

Donations: Feral Feminisms is an independent, inter-media, peer-reviewed, and open access online journal created by volunteer/unpaid scholars committed to equitable knowledge-making and knowledge-sharing. We welcome your support through donations, which will go toward maintaining the journal. To donate, please follow this link: https://feralfeminisms.com/donate/. Your support will be acknowledged on our website and in the downloadable version of our forthcoming issues.

CFP Issue 11 – Transnationalizing Homonationalism // CLOSED. Thanks to all who submitted.

The problem with empire is that it’s incredibly devious and always finds ways to absorb our struggles and incorporate them as part of its project of domination. We just have to remain careful and continue organizing. Resisting pinkwashing and homonationalism isn’t actually just about producing academic theory, more tangibly it’s about: supporting survivors of state violence, ending prisons and detention centers, helping queer and trans people find affordable housing and shelter. The best forms of resistance are in the actual work on the ground to keep people alive. -Janani Balasubramanian and Alok Vaid-Menon, 2015

Feral Feminisms, an independent, inter-media, peer-reviewed, and open access online journal, invites submissions from artists, activists, and scholars for a special issue titled, “Transnationalizing Homonationalism,” guest edited by Amy Verhaeghe. The issue will explore transnational approaches to theorizing, visualizing, and producing knowledge about homonationalism. Submitted contributions may include full-length theoretical essays (5000 – 7000 words), shorter creative pieces, cultural commentaries, personal narratives or auto-ethnographies (500 – 2500 words), poetry, photo-essays, short films/video (uploaded to Vimeo), visual (jpeg) and sound art, or a combination of forms. Please send inquiries and submissions to the guest editor, Amy Verhaeghe, at amy.verhaeghe[at]gmail[dot]com.

US sexual exceptionalism, along with the ascendency of whiteness and queerness as regulatory, is a central underpinning of Jasbir Puar’s (2007) formulation of homonationalism. Yet Puar’s conceptualization of US sexual exceptionalism is inherently transnational; she conceptualizes US sexual exceptionalism as a formation that constructs the US as an “exceptional nation-state” which is both unlike and superior to other nation-states while simultaneously facilitating the United States’ production of “states of exception” (2007, 3). Puar argues that “deployments of homonationalism…bolster the nation” by invigorating “a transnational discourse of U.S. sexual exceptionalism vis-à-vis perversely racialized bodies of pathologized sexualities (both inside and outside U.S. borders)” (2007, 51). As such, neither homonationalism nor American exceptionalism is confined to US borders and both are implicated in the reconfigurations of queerness and race that are mobilized to legitimize racist violence and neoliberal practices both within and outside of the United States.

Paola Bacchetta and Jin Haritaworn (2011) also map out a transnational framework for theorizing homonationalism. They trace the transnational connectivities and processes that enable the construction of “western civilization” and create the conditions for queer inclusion. Haritaworn asserts that “[d]isparate histories of colonialism, slavery, genocide and migration are collapsed into a single globalised trope of civilization and modernity, thus enabling the cohering of nations, Europe and a West, who all share the same enemy” (2011, 131). This process creates the conditions of possibility for homonormative inclusion within particular western nation-states by enabling the alignment of homonormativity with the west through queer deployments of civilizational discourse, producing queer collusions with national and transnational regimes of securitization, imprisonment, and war (ibid.). Other scholars have begun to theorize homonationalism transnationally, delineating how homonationalist formations reinvigorate and reconfigure transnational manifestations of anti-Blackness (e.g., Agathangelou, 2013; Walcott, 2015; Dryden, 2015), settler colonialism (e.g., Byrd, 2017; Kauanui, 2018; Driskill, Finley, Gilley, & Morgensen, 2011), Orientalism (e.g., Shakhsari, 2013; Kinsman & Gentile, 2015), and whiteness (e.g., Wekker, 2016).

This issue of Feral Feminisms seeks contributions that build on and reimagine existing scholarship on transnational homonationalism, and asks:

• How does homonationalism emerge outside of and in relation to the US?
• How do whiteness, anti-Blackness, and/or Orientalism manifest transnationally in relation to the intersection of race and queerness?
• How can settler homonationalism be theorized transnationally? How do discourses and practices of queer inclusion, homonormativity, and LGBTQ rights reinscribe and regenerate settler colonial ideologies and practices in a transnational context?
• How are trans politics being drawn into transnational homonationalist formations?
• How do transnational kinship networks, diasporic subjectivities, and migration networks complicate transnational constructions of homonationalism?

Submission Instructions: By January 15, 2020 submit completed pieces to Managing Co-Editor AV Verhaeghe. In addition to the completed piece, please also send a 60-word author biography and 100-word abstract as one separate Word document. For more detailed submission guidelines, visit http://www.feralfeminisms.com/submission-guidelines/. Please prepare your submissions using Chicago author date. Feral Feminisms only considers submissions that are not previously published or under review at other journals. Contributors retain copyright of the pieces under Creative Commons licensing.

Publications Access Policy: In the interest of making access to information more free, to challenge commercial publishing, and to encourage authors with limited or no institutional access to draw on academic journals and databases, Feral Feminisms editors will facilitate access to necessary journal articles, book chapters, and books when possible for potential or current authors. If authors need specific manuscripts to complete drafting or revising their pieces, please contact the editors, who will do everything we can to ensure you have access to those materials.

Celebrating Trans Authors section of Feral Feminisms’ Issue 10 // CLOSED. Thanks to all who submitted.

Feral Feminisms’ Issue 10 is looking for book reviews of work by transgender, nonbinary, and Two-Spirit authors. If you know of an academic monograph, edited collection, poetry book, podcast series, novel, art series, or film created by a trans, nonbinary, or Two-Spirit person that you would like to celebrate, we invite you to send an email to the Editors of the Issue at generalsubmissions[at]feralfeminisms[dot]com. Please include a 3-5 sentence description of what you would like to review and why in the body of the email. In the spirit of opening up what form a book review can take, we invite you also to think of the book review broadly conceived including as an interview with the author or as a personal engagement and in mediums other than text (i.e., audio, video). Reviews in standard book review format of up to 750 words are also welcome. Reviewers will receive a copy of the book they will be reviewing and their review will be featured in the “Celebrating Trans Authors” section of Feral Feminisms’ Issue 10. Deadline for review proposals is April 15th, 2019 with the reviews themselves due on July 15th, 2019. Keep a look-out for future book review calls!

CFP Issue 12 – General Issue // Deadline: 15 January 2019 // CLOSED. Please contact Feral Feminisms if you submitted to this issue and didn’t receive an email from us in August 2022 (some emails bounced back).

Feral Feminisms, an independent, intermedia, peer-reviewed, and open access online journal, invites submissions from artists, activists, and scholars for our first general submissions issue. We invite contributors to submit work that queers, radicalizes, decolonizes, or otherwise fucks with existing systems of power and dominance. We orientate this issue toward change and against capitalist, nationalist, carceral, and settler colonial systems.

Submitted contributions may include full-length theoretical essays (5000 – 7000 words), shorter creative pieces, cultural commentaries, personal narratives or auto-ethnographies (500 – 2500 words), poetry, photo-essays, short films/video (uploaded to Vimeo), visual and sound art (jpeg Max 1MB), or a combination of forms. We especially encourage less traditional mediums of knowledge creation such as podcasts, collaborative pieces, and multimedia scholarship. This issue will be coordinated by Jae Basiliere and Krista Benson. Please send inquiries and submissions to generalsubmissions[at]feralfeminisms[dot]com.

We are interested in all general submissions that fit this CFP, but particularly welcome submissions that address:

• Creative practices and processes that interrupt, address, or highlight systems of inequality and power.
• Work that defies traditional disciplinary and interdisciplinary expectations within academia including those around sole authorship and traditional article formats.
• Work that challenges the expectation that activism is not intellectual work OR that intellectual work cannot be activism.
• Send us the work that you think “no, nobody would publish something that radical/off the wall/strange/challenging.” You might be wrong.

Submission Instructions: By January 15, 2019 submit completed pieces to Managing Co-Editors Jae Basiliere and Krista Benson at generalsubmissions[at]feralfeminisms[dot]com. In addition to the completed piece, please also send a 60-word author biography and 100-word abstract as one separate Word document. For more detailed submission guidelines, visit http://www.feralfeminisms.com/submission-guidelines/. Please prepare your submissions using Chicago author date. Feral Feminisms only considers submissions that are not previously published or under review at other journals. Contributors retain copyright of the pieces under Creative Commons licensing.

Publications Access Policy: In the interest of making access to information more free, to challenge commercial publishing, and to encourage authors with limited or no institutional access to draw on academic journals and databases, Feral Feminisms editors will facilitate access to necessary journal articles, book chapters, and books when possible for potential or current authors. If authors need specific manuscripts to complete drafting or revising their pieces, please contact the editors, who will do everything we can to ensure you have access to those materials.

CFP Issue 9 – State Killing: Queer and Women of Color Manifestas against U.S. Violence and Oppression // CLOSED. Thanks to all who submitted.

Feral Feminisms, an independent, inter-media, peer-reviewed, and open-access online journal, invites submissions from artists, activists, and scholars for a special issue titled, “State Killing: Queer and Women of Color Manifestas against U.S. Violence and Oppression,” guest edited by Annie Hill, Niq D. Johnson, and Ersula Ore. The issue will center the voices and anti-violence work of queer and women of color activist-intellectuals by providing a forum for provocative manifestas and manifestations of feminism. Submitted contributions may include full-length theoretical essays (5000 – 7000 words), shorter creative pieces, cultural commentaries, personal narratives or auto-ethnographies (500 – 2500 words), poetry, photo-essays, short films/video (uploaded to Vimeo), visual and sound art (jpeg Max 1MB), or a combination of forms. Please send inquiries and submissions to the guest editors: Annie Hill (anniehill[at]utexas[dot]edu); Niq D. Johnson (niq.djohnson[at]pitt[dot]edu); and Ersula Ore (ejore[at]asu[dot]edu); cc’ing Feral Feminisms in the email (feralfeminisms[at]gmail[dot]com).

In this moment, President Donald Trump’s administration is building on a long history of U.S. state violence, entrenching division and devaluing the peoples who have made “America” and who precede its founding. Surviving the state we’re in demands visionary plans for its demise: blueprints to create change and solidarity that do not rely on, or reproduce, the life (and death) worlds the state creates through systemic oppression. Living in a killing state requires strategies for defense, coalition, and community building. The question, then, is how to resist and kill this state by subverting its claims, refusing its orders, and rejecting its phobic fear of others. Rooted in resistance, the manifestas sought for this issue will offer passionate guides that unpack and attack state projects predicated on human devaluation and disposability within U.S. borders or transnationally due to U.S. influence and involvement.

As a feminist genre, manifestas typically make three moves: they chronicle oppression, outline objectives, and confront oppressors to catalyze audiences toward common action. Manifestas offer opportunities to answer Joy James’ call for activist-intellectuals to confront state violence and create visions of social justice, cooperative relations, and radical resistance. Manifestas are responsive to what Kate Eichhorn calls “dirty history”: history that does not follow the legacies and colonized traditions of “reason, meaning, or higher purpose” (2012, 17). Contributions to this issue may be committed to a wide range of queer and women of color (Q/WOC) public forums and expressions. Adela C. Licona observes how feminist zine culture offers occasions to envision an alternative “third-space” that “materialize[s] and reflect[s] borderlands rhetorics through the languages of resistance, opposition, and most importantly, coalition” (2013, 59). Manifestas also display disloyalty to disciplinary norms and deploy unorthodox methods. For instance, epistemic disruptions entangling auto-ethnography, visual rhetoric, and decolonized futurism can draw connections across past, present, and future rebellions and reconstructions. In these ways, manifestas offer to make “meaningful and relevant knowledges, practices, and relations that first imagine and then reconstruct, promote, and represent antiracist agendas and models of social justice and egalitarian social discourses” (Licona, 60).

Working in and outside of the academy, scholars have sought new mediums for contending with the systemic violence of state institutions, including universities. Some of their projects produce scholarship as study, struggle, and play, expanding the boundaries of criticism to the interactive praxis of radical world-making.

This special issue thus calls for manifestas in multiple forms that speak to the complexity of their subjects. For example, Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ (2016) Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity jettisons traditional literary criticism and offers a rich, experimental engagement with Hortense Spillers’ (2003) Black, White, and in Color. Similarly, in Electric Arches (2017), Eve L. Ewing combines prose, poetry, and visual art to explore black girlhood as something other than a symptom of violence and trauma. In our view, these texts are fully-fleshed manifestas and manifestations of feminism that defy formality while drawing on black feminist discursive and oral traditions. As a feral form of Q/WOC rhetoric and resistance, we seek manifestas that move between the formal and innovative and will move audiences to act against state violence.

We welcome submissions that take up the ideas above and the manifesta form in relation to the following themes, including but not limited to:

• Drawing from diverse experience and expertise—such as literary analysis, activism, Afrofuturism, etc.—to produce blueprints for alternative formations and futures that confound state violence within and beyond U.S. borders
• Examining psychological, embodied, spiritual, and generational trauma, stress, healing, and liberation in relation to state violence in the United States or transnationally due to U.S. military, economic, and/or policy interventions and influence
• Reimagining resistance that has been co-opted or consumed by the state (e.g., carceral feminism, nonprofit industrial complex, politics as a brand or consumer good, etc.)
• Analyzing traditional avenues of interacting with the state (e.g., voting, petitioning, protesting, lobbying, etc.) to interrogate how they open and/or limit opportunities for resistance, redress, and redirection
• Creating performances and praxis to foment ethical politics and political engagement
• Offering feminist responses to “cancel” culture, rape culture, white supremacy, Native dispossession, xenophobia, heteronormativity, homonormativity, and other practices of exclusion/inclusion
• Disrupting U.S. state projects of devaluation and disposability
• Exploring disciplinary intersections and activist modes for resisting, reimagining, and eradicating the state

Submission Instructions: By August 31, submit completed pieces to the three guest editors, Annie Hill (anniehill[at]utexas[dot]edu), Niq D. Johnson (niq.djohnson[at]pitt[dot]edu), Ersula Ore (ejore[at]asu[dot]edu), and Feral Feminisms at (feralfeminisms[at]gmail[dot]com). In addition to the completed piece, please also send a 60-word author biography and 100-word abstract as one separate Word document. For more detailed submission guidelines, visit http://www.feralfeminisms.com/submission-guidelines/.

*Photograph from Para-Production art installation  by Haifeng Ni at Manifesta 9. Photo credited to Yohan Creemers.

CFP Issue 8 – Critical Interventions in Rape Culture // CLOSED. Thanks to all who submitted.

Feral Feminisms, an independent, inter-media, peer reviewed, open access online journal, invites submissions from artists, activists, and scholars for a special issue entitled, Critical Interventions in Rape Culture, guest edited by Nisha Eswaran, Emma McKenna, and Sarah Wahab. Submitted contributions may include full-length theoretical essays (about 5000 – 7000 words), shorter creative pieces, cultural commentaries, personal narratives or auto-ethnographies (about 500 – 2500 words), poetry, photo-essays, short films/video (uploaded to Vimeo), visual and sound art (jpeg Max 1MB), or a combination of these. Please direct inquiries and submissions to all three of the guest editors: Nisha Eswaran (eswaranb[at]mcmaster[dot]ca), Emma McKenna (mckennej[at]mcmaster[dot]ca), and Sarah Wahab (wahabsa[at]mcmaster[dot]ca) and to Feral Feminisms (feralfeminisms[at]gmail[dot]com).

This past year has marked a historical moment with the phrase “rape culture” featured in headlines across Canada, particularly as Jian Ghomeshi’s high profile sexual assault case received the verdict of acquittal. While some feminist criticisms of this verdict have been made public, and the affective dismay has been felt throughout our diverse communities, there remains an absence of a collective critical feminist intervention into not only the handling of the Ghomeshi trial, but also the concept of rape culture writ large. This issue of Feral Feminisms, “Critical Interventions in Rape Culture,” seeks to explore how feminists can critically intervene in rape culture, and the uneven disciplining of sexual assault by institutional, criminal, judicial, and carceral systems.

In 1988, Canadian feminist scholar Susan Sherwin asserted that “patriarchy, or male domination, is the social norm throughout our culture” and that “such dominance has been further reinforced through the various means by which men control women’s sexuality” (137). Sherwin argues that heterosexual rape is one of these primary “mechanisms to reinforce such dominance,” not unlike the international arms race “where small, ‘weaker’ nations find themselves forced to align themselves with a superpower in the hope of achieving protection from the aggression of other nations” (137). Again in 1988, rape culture as a concept emerges in the writing of American scholar Susan Griffin, who argues that: “Our society is a rape culture because it fosters and encourages rape by teaching males and females that it is natural and normal for sexual relations to involve aggressive behavior on the part of males. To end rape, people must be able to envision a relationship between the sexes that involves sharing, warmth, and equality, and to bring about a social system in which these values are fostered” (52). Nora Samaran’s 2016 article, “The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture,” similarly argues that underlying a culture of rape is men’s inability to express a need for intimacy and connection with others.

The parallels between Samaran’s recent concerns and those of Sherwin and Griffin thirty years prior suggest that we are at a curious impasse in 2016, where the feminist (or post-feminist?) concept of rape culture has come to stand in for and obscure a whole host of relations of dominance relating to sexual assault. Yasmin Nair (2014) suggests that conceiving of sexual violence through the framework of a rape culture intersects with and arises from a “culture of confession” that reproduces survivors of rape as neoliberal subjects. This insight begs the question, then, of how does the concept of a rape culture rely on neoliberal notions of subjectivity, self-hood, and traumatic injury that place limitations on how critiques of rape culture might function as resistive tools? How might the increased emphasis on “consent”—positioned as a solution to rape via state, institutional, and media discourses—align itself with the status quo and with gendered, racial, classed, and sexual power relations under neoliberal capitalism? How does the concept of rape culture find belonging within dominant notions of femininity, wealth, and whiteness, and how does this affect the experiences of and legibility of sexual violence that occurs elsewhere and at the intersections of marginality, particularly amongst people who are poor, racialized as non-white, Indigenous, queer, trans, and/or engaged in sex work?

With these questions in mind, this issue of Feral Feminisms seeks critical interventions into rape culture that go beyond the naming of rape culture, and instead interrogate its dynamics, propose alternative forms of resistance, and develop theory that breaks down and specifies its discursive, material, and representative power. Topics and questions may include, but are not limited to historical and contemporary mediations on rape culture in relation to:

• activism
• challenges to the gender binary
• masculinity
• queerness
• transness
• dis/ability
• Indigeneity
• Blackness
• race and racialization
• whiteness
• diaspora and citizenship
• capitalism and neoliberalism
• colonialism and post-colonials
• Marxism
• residential schools
• the child welfare system
• poverty
• sex work
• wage work, unions
• campuses
• prisons, Truth and Reconciliation Councils, alternative forms of justice
• intimacy, friendship, family, community
• media, social media, and celebrity
• rape crisis centers, the rape crisis movement, take back the night

We invite contributions that critically interrogate, through a contemporary or historical lens, the relation of rape culture to the questions laid out above, as well as other themes. Please send submissions along with a 60-word author biography, and a 100-word abstract to all three of the guest editors: Nisha Eswaran (eswaranb@mcmaster.ca), Emma McKenna (mckennej@mcmaster.ca), and Sarah Wahab (wahabsa@mcmaster.ca) and to Feral Feminisms (feralfeminisms[at]gmail[dot]com) by 1 April 2017. For detailed submission guidelines please visit: http://www.feralfeminisms.com/submission-guidelines/

CFP Issue 7 – Queer Feminine Affinities // CLOSED. Thanks to all who submitted.

Feral Feminisms, a new, independent, inter-media, peer-reviewed, open-access online journal, invites submissions for a special issue entitled “Queer Feminine Affinities” guest edited by Alexa Athelstan and Vikki Chalklin. Submitted contributions may include full-length academic essays (5000 – 7000 words),  shorter creative pieces, cultural commentaries, or personal narratives (500 – 2500 words), poetry, photo essays, short films and videos (uploaded to Vimeo), visual and sound art (jpeg Max 1MB), or a combination of these. Please direct inquiries and submissions to Guest Editors Alexa Athelstan and Vikki Chalklin queerfeminineaffinities[at]gmail[dot]com. “Queer Feminine Affinities” aspires to become the first collaborative project that collects a diverse variety of written and visual materials by, on and for femme, queer, alternative and subversive feminine voices and communities emerging from across the UK, Europe, North America and beyond.

Inspired by collections like Joan Nestle’s (1992) The Persistent Desire: A Femme Butch Reader,  Chloë Brushwood Rose and Anna Camilleri’s (2003) Brazen Femme, Ulrika Dahl and Del LaGrace Volcano’s (2008) Femmes of Power, Jennifer Clare Burke’s (2009) Visible: A Femmethology, and Ivan E. Coyote and Zena Sharman’s (2011) Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, amongst other engagements with femme and queer femininities, Queer Feminine Affinities warmly invites written and visual materials that reflect on femme, queer and alternative femininities as an embodied lived experience, identity and imagined community. The collection is particularly interested in reflections that can contribute to, challenge and expand on the established legacies of these wonderfully rich anthologies.

The collection asks to what extent conceptualizations and lived realities of femme, queer, alternative and subversive femininities have travelled and translated along transnational lines of queer inheritances, and where our paths have diverged and our figurations have been reinvented to take fresh forms. Most of all, however, the collection simply aims to provide a space in which a diverse variety of feminine identified voices and perspectives can mingle in creative dialogue, discussing topics that are close to our queer fem(me)inine hearts!

We were delighted to receive an overwhelming and exciting response to our initial call for submissions to “Queer Feminine Affinities.” However, we are still seeking additional submissions on a number of as yet underrepresented topics. With this extended call we specifically welcome work that engages with the following themes. Thus, topics of interest and questions may include, but are not limited to:

Intersectional Femininities

How does femme-ininity intersect with other aspects of embodied experience including:

• “Race,” ethnicity, critical whiteness, racisms, and anti-racisms
• Dis/abilities, (mental) health and ableism
• Class (war), poverty, privilege, precarity, and anti-capitalism
• Cultural differences, heritage, custom, language, and faith/religion
• Fatness/thinness, fat studies and fat activism
• Sex work, porn studies, and sex positivity

Queer, Trans* and non-binary fe(me)ininities

What are the crossovers and relationships between femininity/femme and varied gender identifications including:

• Cis or trans* women who identify as feminine or femme
• Cis or trans* men who identify as feminine or femme
• Non-binary, intersex, and/or genderqueer people who identify as feminine or femme
• Masculinity, Androgyny and Butchness
• “Femmephobia” or “sissyphobia” within and outside of queer spaces
• Disentangling femininity from cis-female identifications

Queer(y)ing Femininities

How do we engage with the implications of uncritically accepting femininity, including:

• (Homo)normative femininities
• Critical, radical, or queer hetero-femininities
• The complexities, problematics, and limitations of (queer) femininities

(Non-)Geographically Located Femininities

What is at stake in femme/femininities that are located either geographically or within other communities including:

• Particular countries, regions, towns, cities, and spaces
• Diasporas, transnational fem(me)ininities and communities
• Virtual, affective, or ephemeral communities and relationships

CFP – The Neoliberal University: Labour, Struggle, and Transformation // CLOSED. Thanks to all who submitted.

NOTE: IF YOU SUBMITTED A PIECE TO THIS CFP, PLEASE CONTACT THE MANAGING EDITORS FOR AN UPDATE: feralfeminsism [at] gmail [dot] com

Feral Feminisms, an independent, inter-media, peer reviewed, open access online journal, invites submissions from artists, activists, and scholars for a special issue entitled The Neoliberal University: Labour, Struggle, and Transformation, guest edited by Naoko Ikeda and Hans Rollmann. Submitted contributions may include full-length theoretical or findings essays (5000 – 7000 words), shorter creative pieces, cultural commentaries, personal narratives or auto-ethnographies (500 – 2500 words), poetry, photo-essays, short films/video (uploaded to Vimeo), visual and sound art (jpeg Max 1MB), or a combination of these. Please direct inquiries and submissions to both of the guest editors, Naoko Ikeda (ikeda.naoko75 [at] gmail [dot] com) and Hans Rollmann (hansnf [at] gmail [dot] com).

Universities in the early 21^st century are more than sites of study; increasingly, they are sites of struggle. In the early months of 2015 alone, strikes and occupations have erupted at prominent universities in Canada, the UK, and The Netherlands. Students and faculty have in recent years played leading roles in broader civil society struggles in Chile, Mexico, Turkey, Greece, South Africa, and elsewhere. Many of these struggles are being waged over core issues intrinsic to the university’s identity: commercialization, autonomy, academic freedom, labour rights. These struggles often bear a strong feminist imprint and are indelibly tied to broader and diverse contestations of unjust social structures and hierarchies such as patriarchy, heterosexism, racism, ableism, and on-going colonizations. And they occur against a broader backdrop in which universities find their role and operations increasingly framed by a neoliberal rationality that has ravaged both academic and non-academic workers’ experience of labour in the contemporary university. Much existing research has focused on efforts to chart the transformation of labour in the university under neoliberalism (Brown 2015; Luxton & Mossman 2012; Reimer 2004; Turk 2000), and to analyze these transformations as well as forms of resistance that have emerged in response (Butler 2015; Badiou 2012; Chun 2009; Canaan & Shumar 2008; Ross & Gibson 2006; Hudson et al 1997).

This issue of Feral Feminisms aims to further this work by drawing together ongoing and recent research in this area. It also takes aim at drawing connections across borders, and exploring how processes shaping transformation of the university as a site of labour are linked transnationally. It aims to explore how the resistance movements emerging in response to precarity and neoliberalization of labour at the university–movements aimed at preserving principles of worker dignity, gender justice, academic freedom, freedom of inquiry and expression, democracy and transparency, equity, social justice and accessibility–are linked internationally. Such links are not always formal (although formal exchanges of experiences and tactics do occur) but often manifest through nuanced processes of media consumption, political/social movement-building, and other informal methods of engagement across borders.

The Neoliberal University: Labour, Struggle, and Transformation seeks pieces that examine from a feminist perspective how the university is an increasingly complex and diverse site of labour. This includes the growing complexity of universities as communities of academic labour, and their engagement with both administrative bureaucracies and the state. Yet universities also rely on a large pool of non-academic labour in order to function: janitorial/maintenance staff, administrative assistants, food service providers, security personnel, technicians, and student support staff (who often represent devalued, precaritized, gendered, and racialized forms of work). Universities are embedded in communities, relying on local transit systems as well as housing and service providers within the university’s immediate sphere. While the public image of universities often relies on a division of labour between academic and non-academic staff that typically endows the former with a more privileged status, universities are also sites where these imagined divides are increasingly fluid.

This Special Issue asks: How do academic workers, non-academic workers, communities of workers, and the broader community experience and shape the processes of institutional transformation as well as resistance? This issue seeks to explore the university as a site of labour from a broad perspective, and welcomes submissions that explore the nature and role of non-academic labour in the processes of transformation and resistance outlined here.

We are seeking original research articles offering data, analysis and arguments oriented around these themes, and addressing the questions and issues highlighted below. We also welcome submission of personal and creative contributions–personal narratives, fiction, poetry, art–connected with the themes of this issue.

Themes and questions to consider include:

Emerging forms of resistance: What forms of resistance are emerging against the precarity and disciplining of labour in the university? What is new or innovative about these resistances? In what ways do they build on, replicate, and/or challenge the structures of oppression and resistance from which they have emerged? How do they engage with feminism[s], and how do feminisms engage with them?

Drawing across borders: What connections/influences inherent in the shaping of university labour can be identified across borders? How are pressures to reshape the university as a site of labour linked internationally, and how are these processes mutually constitutive across borders (both within and between states)? How are efforts to resist the precarity and neoliberalization of university labour linked across borders? How do moments of resistance and movement-building influence each other internationally? How do efforts to replicate movements in different geographical/political/cultural communities create and respond to challenges produced by local dissonances? What new questions and languages are produced through these (border-crossing) exchanges and linkages?

Personal is Political, and Political is Personal: How are these struggles personal? How do we as individuals, as communities, as physically embodied individuals, experience the struggles which emerge through universities as sites of labour? How do we reconcile the needs and desires of the individual with the demands of a movement? How are contestations over labour transformations at the university shaped by racism, patriarchy, ableism, ageism, homo/transphobia and other struggles for diversity and social justice?

Labour writ large: What is the role and experience of non-academic labour in the university, in institutional restructurings, and in resistance/protest movements at universities? How are the non-academic communities of labour on which universities rely classed, racialized, and gendered?

CFP ISSUE 6 – Feral Theory // CLOSED. Thanks to all who submitted.

Feral Feminisms, a new independent, inter-media, peer reviewed, open access  online journal, invites submissions from artists, activists, and scholars for a special issue entitled, Feral Theory, guest edited by Chloë Taylor and Kelly Struthers Montford. This issue of Feral Feminisms seeks writings that explore the feral from feminist, critical animal, queer, environmental, critical disability, critical race, anti-colonial, intersectional, interlocking, and mongrelized perspectives. Submitted contributions may include full-length academic essays (about 5000 – 7000 words), shorter creative pieces, cultural commentaries, or personal narratives (about 500 – 2500 words), poetry, photo-essays, short films/video (uploaded to Vimeo), visual and sound art (jpeg Max 1MB), or a combination of these. Please direct inquiries and submissions to Guest Editors Chloë Taylor (chloe.taylor[at]ualberta[dot]ca) and Kelly Struthers Montford (kstruthe[at]ualberta[dot]ca).

One way in which women have been oppressed has been through their relegation to the domestic sphere and through their domestic labour, and so it makes sense to consider women domesticated rather than feral animals. Indeed, in classic works such as “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” and “In and Out of Harm’s Way: Arrogance and Love,” radical feminist theorists Gayle Rubin and Marilyn Frye describe gendering as domestication. More recently, in “After Alice, After Cats,” Jessica Polish notes that, for Kant, women were originally and quite literally domesticated animals for men; for example, Polish argues that women may have been men’s first domesticated animals. Kant writes that woman was initially a mule, “loaded down with his [man’s] household belongings,” and later, with the development of polygamous marriage, became more like a dog in man’s harem—or, as Kant puts it, “kennel.” Polish argues that, for Kant, it was only with the domestication of non-human animals that monogamous marriage or “civilized,” intra-human relations become possible between the sexes. If, following Rubin, Frye, and Polish, to become women was to be domesticated, it would seem that undoing gender, to borrow Judith Butler’s phrase, would mean going feral. Monique Wittig long ago described lesbians as “escapees” from gender. Wittig’s renegade lesbian is no longer a woman; like the avian inmate who flees the farm, or the dog who joins the wolves, she has gone feral.

The feral has also been theorized within Critical Animal Studies. In Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka criticize animal ethicists for focusing exclusively on domesticated and wild animals, ignoring the billions of “liminal” animals who live within human communities without being of those communities or directly subjected to human control. For Donaldson and Kymlicka, liminal animals are in different political relations to humans than domesticated and wild animals, and a different set of moral obligations to these animals is entailed by these relations. Although Donaldson and Kymlicka’s theory is important because it draws the attention of critical animal theorists to a previously ignored category of animal, they arguably subsume ferality into existing neoliberal society in a way that evacuates the feral of its political potential. A more radical approach to thinking the feral within Critical Animal Studies would not domesticate the feral into existing human political categories, but would begin with these liminal animals in order to feralize political theory. In “Taming Ourselves or Going Feral: Toward a Nonpatriarchal Metaethic of Animal Liberation,” for instance, Brian Luke takes up the feminist association of patriarchy with domestication to argue that a nonpatriarchal approach to animal liberation would entail such a feralization of thought.

Queer theorist Jack Halberstam has recently argued that the term “queer” has been domesticated, or is being used interchangeably with ‘gay’ to describe homonormalizing political agendas. For Halberstam, we thus need a new term to do the work that “queer” once did, and he proposes “going wild.” Halberstam argues in Gaga Feminism that we are living in a time of chaos, where the meanings of once stable phenomena such as gender and marriage have become definitionally unstable—things are “going gaga” or “crazy.” Rather than resisting this moment of instability and trying to put definitions back in place, Halberstam argues that now should be a time of (queer) anarchy or “wildness.” Halberstam sees this argument for wildness as building on his earlier argument for embracing failure in The Queer Art of Failure, which takes as its exemplars animated revolting chickens, the anarchic bodies of children, and the failed femininity of butch lesbians. Contra Halberstam, however, “going feral” better describes the situation of moving to a less tamed or untamed state after (failed) domestication, whereas, just as there is no “outside of power” for Foucault, there is arguably no possibility of “going wild.” What we need, then, we suggest, is not so much a rewilding of queer theory as its feralization.

At the same time, this issue seeks to explore the racist, ableist, and class-bound implications of elaborating a theory of the feral. While feral is a provocative concept for thinking a rewilding of queer and feminist theories, it is also a term that has been wielded against marginalized bodies and populations. We thus solicit reflections on the manners in which disabled subjects are seen as feral or out of control, and the ways in which these bodies are domesticated, sequestered, expected to be “patients” and to remain at (or in a) home. We invite speculations on the ways that indigenous peoples and bodies are framed as feral or “savage,” and are expected to be domesticated within the reconciliatory ethos of settler colonialism. We are also interested in exploring the racist routes that ferality traverses—historically, politically, and theoretically.

In the spirit of auto-critique, this special issue also invites challenges to our appropriation of the feral as potentially reflecting white privilege. Does our very willingness to celebrate the feral and to propose ferality reflect racial privilege? Although women, including white women, have been viewed as less than fully human and have been associated with animals, the history of animalizing people of colour of both sexes has arguably been even more brutal. Might it be that we are willing to invite identifications with the feral and cultivations of a feral feminism—despite their strong connotations of animality—because we are not among those people who have been denigrated as beastly, savage, primitive, and uncivilized with the most oppressive effects?

Turning to environmental theory, feminist philosophers such as Claire Colebrook and Joanna Zylinska have begun to grapple with what feminist theory and ethics, respectively, should look like in the Anthropocene. Essayists such as George Monbiot encourage rewilding as a way to reconnect with nature and, in turn, our sense of wonder and enchantment with Earth. As we come to terms with the apparent inevitability of ecological catastrophe and mass human die-outs, is it helpful to theorize the feral as an antecedent to learning to live ferally?

While feminist theorists debate the relative advantages of intersectionalism versus interlocking oppressions as models for understanding how different forms of oppression and the subjectivities they produce coalesce and interact, this issue proposes promiscuous matings of theory as a mark of the feral. Far from domesticated pure-breds whose reproduction is constrained by pre-given agendas, ferals interact with each other as they choose and at the moment, producing mongrels. In developing a feral theory, we thus also call for a mongrelization of thought.

We welcome submissions that take up any of the above ideas or explore ferality and feral animals in other ways. Topics and questions may include, but are not limited to:

• crip, queer, and anti-colonial appropriations of the feral;
• critical animal studies reflections on feral animals;
• critical race reflections on ferality, mongrel animals and mongrelized theory;
• feminist, critical animal studies, queer, crip and critical race critiques of sex, gender, normalization and colonization as domestication;
• reflections on the potential of queer theory going feral versus going wild;
• Anthropocene feminist perspectives on the feral future of humans.

CFP ISSUE 5 – Untimely Bodies: Futurity, Resistance, and Non-Normative Embodiment // CLOSED. Thanks to all who submitted.

Recent literature in feminist, queer, fat, and critical disability theory has drawn attention to the hegemonic nature of dominant time orders and how they have made certain lives unlivable (Edelman 2004; Halberstam 2005; Love 2009; Freeman 2010; Muñoz 2009). Much of this scholarship has critically argued that the future and futurity have troubling normative force in the present. Alison Kafer (2014) for example, highlights disabled bodies as the “sign of the future of no future” (34). Although dominant time orders structure our social, economic, and political lives in ways that flatten the complexity and richness of lived experiences, these time orders can be resisted and reconstituted. Lee Edelman calls for a refusal of the future, a refusal “of the coercive belief in the paramount value of futurity” (6), while Kafer asks us to imagine “disability and disability futures otherwise” (34). Temporality, then, is a site for considering the ways in which bodies resist normativity. Focusing on how we create, inhabit, and resist dominant time orders, we ask how desiring, bringing forth, and struggling towards particular futures (even when those futures themselves resist futurity) can enact resistances.

This special issue of Feral Feminisms calls for submissions that explore the intersection of embodiment, temporality, and resistance. Time is necessarily embodied and is our opening into meaning, language, community, and resistance politics. How then are bodies that move, desire, communicate, fuck, laugh, stim, stutter, jiggle, give birth, and leak possible openings for more hospitable, generative, and anti-oppressive futures? Resisting dominant norms need not entail an outright refusal of the future, but rather, the refusal of a particular future. How can non-normative embodiments as sites of resistance reimagine and reinhabit rather than simply reject dominant temporal narratives?

Topics and questions may include, but are not limited to:

• The temporality of resistance
• Phenomenology of non-normative embodiments in relation to dominant temporalities
• The racialization of time
• The production of temporal narratives though cultural representations
• How can time be reinscribed and/or reconstituted in and through embodiment?
• Mothering out of, against, or through time.
• How can normative futures be reimagined?
• Economic speed and futurity
• Post-workerism and anti-work politics
• Death, dying, and illness
• Eugenics and embodiment
• Monuments, memorials, memory, and history
• Trans* temporalities
• “Risky lifestyles” and death
• Healthism, anti-aging, and youth

CFP ISSUE 4 – Complicities, Connections, and Struggles: Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis of Settler Colonialism // CLOSED. Thanks to all who submitted.

Indigenous and/or critical race scholars and activists have raised questions about the anti-colonial and decolonization politics of diasporic people of colour living in white settler colonies. Some key discussions include whether people of colour are settlers, what their place is in the structure of white settler colonialism, and what kinds of anti- and de-colonial alliances they can form with Indigenous peoples in white settler colonies. Many of these conversations are heavily informed by the critiques of anti-racist scholarship put forth by the Mi’kmaw scholar Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua (2005) in their article “Decolonizing Antiracism.” Critiquing anti-racist scholars for failing to ground their critiques in the original and ongoing colonial violence against Indigenous peoples of the lands they now occupy, Lawrence and Dua argue that people of colour are complicit in ongoing processes of settler colonialism and nation-building. While several theorists of colour engaged with this article by examining and challenging their own complicity in the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples, some also challenged Lawrence and Dua’s arguments by critiquing their conflation of settler colonialism and immigration, and by questioning who is autochthonous to the land and what it means to claim rights based on indigeneity (Sharma and Wright, 2008/09).

With careful attention to semantics and with a firm caution to not metaphorize decolonization (Tuck and Yang, 2012), this special issue of Feral Feminisms calls for submissions that center indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, that explore the ways in which anti-racist theory and practice uphold and sustain colonial discourse, and that imagine social movements, communities, and scholarship that work within a social justice framework in ways that resist the reproduction of colonial dynamics. We encourage submissions that pay close attention to the ways in which multiple histories, violences, borders, spaces, time, race, gender, class, sexualities, and genealogies are mobilized to uphold white settler colonialism. We are also interested in exploring sites of solidarity, resistance, and hope between Indigenous peoples and people of colour. We invite contributors to displace the nation-state by engaging with critical feminist transnational perspective(s) and modes of knowledge production. We also take our cue here from Indigenous feminist writings that theorize Indigenous nationhood and sovereignty as challenges to the borders of white settler colonial states. Conjointly, we trace the lineages of these conversations to the contributions of Black feminists, feminists of colour, transnational feminists, and trans/queer theorists who disrupt the violence of settler colonialism by challenging the gendered and heteropatriarchal organizing of bodies in these white settler states.

Possible questions for exploration for this issue include:

• What are some of the common grounds between Indigenous peoples and people of colour in struggles against racism, gender-based violence, poverty, exclusionary immigration policies, labour commodification and exploitation, police violence, the prison-industrial complex, ableist policies and structures, invasions, and wars, that need to be urgently (but ethically) examined?
• How are histories and presents of Indigenous peoples in white settler colonies entangled with those of Indigenous peoples of former European colonies, those living within present-day American invasions (outside of the Americas), or those who have been forced on this land through generations of slavery?
• How can we trace and resist histories, legacies and violences of anti-Black racism in settler colonial contexts?
• How can we centre gender and sexuality in critiques of settler colonialism and white supremacy?
• How can we challenge ableism within the nation state as well as in the academy and engage with critical disability theoretical interventions in the making of the settler nation state as well as racial formations?
• How does trans theory help understand the making of gender and exclusionary violences in white settler states?
• What place do migrants/refugees fleeing political, economic, and social wars – some instigated by the “West” and some from within the postcolonial nations – have in white settler societies?
• In what ways do extant imperial and colonial forces operate differently towards these communities in terms of necropolitics (Mbembe, 2002) in determining who is invited into the realm of social life and who, instead, is confined to social death? More urgently, how does “social” death come to be, at its extent, implicated in genocide and concrete loss?

We welcome submissions from all fields that relate to Indigenous studies, social and political theory, critical race theory, anti-racism theory, settler colonialism, postcolonial theory, transnational theory, art and literature, critical disability studies, gender, feminist and women’s studies, trans and queer theory, and equity studies. We extend a hearty invitation to community members and social justice activists who engage in these discussion through their community work or activist endeavours. And, we clearly recognize that these categories of authors overlap and intertwine as resistance and survival are breathed in all spaces that we inhabit and travel in, and thus welcome contributions that challenge “academic writing” and the academic-industrial complex.

Special Submission Instructions: With your submission, please include a blurb (max. 300 words) stating your connection to the work you are submitting. While the blurb will not impact decision-making, it is meant to invite contributors to engage with the relationships between epistemology and knowledge production by evaluating their own social location as knowledge producers. To take the task of decolonizing knowledge seriously, it is imperative to question processes of knowledge production, creation, and distribution. Further, these blurbs will help the editors to better reflect on the submitted pieces and seek to place them in critical conversations with each other.

CFP ISSUE 3 – Feminine Feelers // CLOSED. Thanks to all who submitted.

Photograph by Simon Panasiewicz

Prior to the recent Affective Turn in critical and cultural theory, feminist theory and philosophy had already been critiquing the role of rationality and the exclusion of emotion in Western thought. Elspeth Probyn (1993) argued for the inclusion of experiential accounts in understanding the relationship between feminist epistemology and ontology; and, Alison Jaggar (1989) worked to restore inquiry as the wisdom of love to Western epistemology by validating emotional acumen as a highly developed skill. For Jaggar, the one who feels different is an emotional outlaw. Emotional outlaws are a kind of precursor, grandmother or godmother, to Ahmed’s (2010) affect aliens: the feminist killjoy, who is angered by the sexist joke, or the melancholic migrant, who longs for something lost, or the unhappy queer, whose happiness is already impossible. Claire Hemmings (2012) has argued that being outside of emotional norms can offer a kind of unification, where affective dissonance is a starting point for feminist politics and can encourage affective solidarity.

But what of a return to previous conceptualizations of feeling in understanding the feminine and feminism? Luce Irigaray (1991), for example, writes of the erasure of the figure of the female lover and the simultaneous loss of the expression of feminine carnality, female divinity, and the representation of the female body. In light of these and other recent works (Cvetkovich, 2012; Grosz, 2011), how might we consider moving forward by taking into consideration feminine feelings?

Feminine Feelers are flustered, fraught, and feral. Feminine Feelers recall feminine modalities of feeling that have gone otherwise. Feminine Feelers ponder the position of emotional misfits such as female mystics, poets, artist, grandmothers, godmothers, cyborgs, golems, lovers, and Other(ed) figures. Feminine Feelers also highlight moments in feminist thought which illuminate the role of feelings and accounts of the body. What challenges does the turn to affect pose to feminist theory? How might we cultivate the sensory in order to tune into what is going on? Is the female an outsider, or is the feminist the outsider? How does outsider status offer a critical distance from cultural and emotional hegemonies? Must this distance be maintained in order to preserve difference?

This special issue of Feral Feminisms seeks to bring together scholars, activists, and artists to think through and feel through categories. Submitted contributions may include papers, visual art, film, poetry and literary pieces. Submissions are encouraged to address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Cults of the feminine
• Indigenous femininities
• Figures and examples: emotional outlaws, affect aliens, fantastic feelers
• Vocabularies of feeling
• Feminine and feminist genealogies
• Theoretical and methodological disjunctures within feminist and queer phenomenology, affect studies, cultural  emotion studies, cultural anthropology
• Art and literature movements and their relationship to affects: the new sincerity, Remodernism, etc.
• Edges, excesses, and limits of Feminine Feelers and feminine feelers
• Animality, feelings, and non-human animals

CFP ISSUE 2 – Feminist Un/Pleasure: Reflections on Perversity, BDSM and Desire // CLOSED. Thanks to all who submitted! 

Photographer: Tania A. // Model: Gesig

What gets you off? Desire is a slippery concept, difficult to hold or describe, and certainly not consistent or interchangeable. An insatiable yearning for some is for others abhorrent and deserving of reprimand. The social complexities of perversion are therefore always in flux, influencing diverse manifestations of sexuality and its censorship. According to Freud’s early formulations on the two principles of psychic functioning, and later developed in his writings on the death drive, pleasure and unpleasure are intimately bound. Our primary drive encompasses both the unpleasure of an increase in excitation and the pleasure of its release. In other words, an individual’s relationship to unencumbered indulgence continually grapples with its denial. This fundamental tension also resonates beyond psychoanalysis, in feminist genealogies, as an ambivalence towards BDSM and “perverse” sexualities. Echoed in Carole Vance’s influential anthology, Pleasure and Danger, and the ongoing battles of the sex wars, feminist sexuality encompasses both enjoyment and suffering wrapped tightly around the politics of desire. This apparent contradiction of painful enjoyment also weaves throughout BDSM sexuality itself, where the lines between violence, sex, and love begin to blur.

This special issue of Feral Feminisms aims to complicate, untame, queer and radicalize tumultuous legacies of pleasure and unpleasure by reflecting upon the current intersections of feminist desire and BDSM sexuality. Topics of inquiry may include, but are not limited to:

• pleasure and pain in feminist sexualities
• resonances of canonical sexologists such as Richard von Kraft Ebbing on contemporary perverse sexualities
• the instability of sexual subcultures vs mainstream
• gender and power play
• representations of perverse feminist sexuality in film, literature, and art
• Fifty Shades of Grey and histories of erotic fiction
• psychoanalytic theories of BDSM and/or perversion
• affect and kinky feminist desire
• sex work and professional dominatrices
• critical interrogations into the construction of subversive sexualities
• masochism, sadism, fetishism
• the politicization of BDSM
• death, the death drive, and queer sexualities
• addressing white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, colonialism, heteronormativity, and/or patriarchy through scenes of perversion
• limit experience
• BDSM sexuality as performance