Current and Forthcoming Calls for Proposals

Forthcoming CFPs

12.3: Trans C19 (Nineteenth Century)
12.4: Ballroom
13.1: General Issue
13.2: Trans Philosophy

Current CFPS

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 12.2: Toward a Trans[]Crip Theory

Guest editors: J. Logan Smilges & Slava Greenberg

In his provocative meditation on the impasse between trans and disability politics in Brilliant Imperfection (2017), Eli Clare calls for a “messier story.” Since then, several scholars working in trans studies and disability studies, including Cassius Adair (2022), Cameron Awkward-Rich (2022), Alexandre Baril (2020, 2023), PJ DiPietro (2020), Sarah Cavar (2021), Slava Greenberg (2020, 2023a, 2023b), V. Jo Hsu (2022a, 2022b), Ada Hubrig (2022), Jasbir Puar (2017), and J. Logan Smilges (2022, 2023a, 2023b), among others, have taken up Claire’s call with attempts to deepen, historicize, or further complicate the conversations tethering both fields. The purpose of this special issue is to galvanize an emerging body of work at the intersection of trans and disability studies as part of a larger disciplinary critique issued by Kadji Amin (2023). His critique shifts focus away from trans subjects toward the “material heterogeneity of trans populations, histories, and epistemologies.” Such trans objects, including disabled, crip, and Mad ways of gendering, are not always legible to the extant corpus of trans studies, and this special issue seeks to make visible the structures of power that have slowed the field from engaging them as and alongside more readily recognizable transgender formations.

The relationship between trans studies and disability studies, we hold, is one marked by suspicion and trepidation, despite a growing number of scholars actively working to bridge the two fields. Similar to disability scholar Alison Kafer’s commentary on the relationship between queer studies and disability studies (2013), it is worth making plain that trans studies, in one way, has “so clearly approached the terrain of disability studies” while, in another way, has by and large refused to name “that closeness.” It is a relationship that, as Awkward-Rich (2022) explains, was generated by “a particular set of rhetorical moves that have since been taken for granted” in trans studies that disavow any “pathologizing discourse about trans lives.” Rather than scold the field for this disavowal, we instead urge a genealogical investigation that addresses the origins of tension between trans and disability as social and political categories, so we might better name and respond to the ableism that has seeped into trans studies’ intellectual project. We acknowledge that this call must be taken up alongside a parallel call in disability studies that derides the cissexism and transphobia haunting some corners of the field. Together, these calls move us beyond superficial gestures of inclusivity toward a demand for mutual accountability. Taking a lead from disability justice activist Mia Mingus, we believe that access without reconciliation–whether to a room, building, or field–is not access worth having.

This issue adopts the phrase “trans[]crip” to name the dynamic proximity between trans and disability. The pair of square brackets, which are customarily used to enclose editorial additions or modifications in quoted text, are left blank as an invitation. Instead of using them to indicate alternatives or corrections, we offer the space between them as a placeholder for what could become a binding -, a wall |, a binary /, a special usage *, some combination, or none of these. The brackets avoid likening “crip” to a consumable object for trans studies, and they leave room for people who might find it beneficial to note the categories’ divergences. We are inspired by Two Spirit and trans-of-color critics who name modes of gender variance beyond the category of transgender, even as they reveal the colonial and racial logics that imbricate transnormativity (Gill-Peterson 2018, Pierce 2020, Snorton and Haritaworn 2013). In this vein and with acknowledgement of the colonial and racial politics informing the pathologization of gender variance, we intend trans[]crip to illustrate distinct political and intellectual movements that are nevertheless entwined at the level of the bodymind. It is the case, for example, that many trans and disabled people experience chronic pain and the sensation of phantom body parts. Many use prosthetics. Many depend on diagnosis to access life-giving care. Many face elevated risks of incarceration, homelessness, state and domestic violence, and medical malpractice. As Smilges has recently suggested (2023), the abled norms that limn normative gender, alongside the cis norms that subtend ideologies of health and ability, ensure a felt kinship between trans and disabled people in the way our bodies rhetorically signify. And as Greenberg shows in a forthcoming book about gender dysphoria, the segregation between trans, Crip, and Mad communities, histories, and movements only serves to perpetuate fascism.

The intellectual questions the issue will address include the following: what occupies the space between trans and crip? What vectors of power condition their relationship? In what ways do their intellectual genealogies bleed or imbricate? To what extent are their liberatory and justice-oriented politics overlapping, distinct, or otherwise entangled? And how might we envision a future for trans studies that more ethically and accountably incorporates the knowledges and praxes of disabled scholars, organizers, and community members?

Submissions may include but need not be limited to the following themes:

trans disability histories
disability justice as agent in trans liberation
legacies of ableism in trans studies
trans cripistemologies
crip engagements with trans cultural production and theory
trans contestations of the foundational “models” of disability (e.g., medical, social, cultural, political-relational, critical, crip negative, etc.)
trans disability configurations beyond the language of gender and disability

We welcome submissions to “Toward a Trans[]Crip Theory” in the form of:

Research articles (up to 5,000 words);
Reviews (up to 2,000 words)—approval needed from editors before submission;
Creative works;
Visual art (300dpi or greater);
Syllabi and teaching materials.

The editors are happy to discuss topics of interest with potential contributors.

Contact:

J. Logan Smilges (logan.smilges@ubc.ca) and
Slava Greenberg (s.greenberg@uva.nl)

Please send complete submissions by May 1, 2024. To submit a manuscript, please visit https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/dup-tsq. Please note that TSQ, like other Duke University Press Journals, has moved to ScholarOne, replacing the prior Editorial Manager platform. If this is your first time using ScholarOne, please register first, then proceed with submitting your manuscript. If you have any difficulties with the process, contact the journal at tsqjournal at gmail.com. All manuscripts must be double-spaced, including quotations and endnotes, and blinded throughout. You must also submit an abstract, keywords, and biographical note at the time of initial submission. Please visit the editorial office's website for a detailed style guide.

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is an academic journal edited by Francisco J. Galarte, Dylan McCarthy Blackston, micha cárdenas, Ciara Cremin, Jules Gill-Peterson, and Abraham B. Weil, and published by Duke University Press. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. One issue of TSQ each year is a non-themed open call, with the other three issues devoted to special themes; every issue also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces. To learn more about the journal and see calls for papers for other special issues, https://femresin.unm.edu/transgender-studies-quarterly/board.html.

Please send complete submissions by May 1, 2024.

Past CFPs

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 12.1: Speculative Media and Fiction

Guest editors: Rox Samer & Cáel M. Keegan

In 1968, author and critic Samuel R. Delany declared, “[A]ny serious discussion of speculative fiction must first get away from the distracting concept of SF content and examine precisely what sort of word-beast sits before us. We must explore both the level of subjunctivity at which speculative fiction takes place and the particular intensity and range of images this level affords.” A few years later Delany’s dear friend author and critic Joanna Russ expanded on Delany’s essay, describing this subjunctivity of speculative fiction—how it approaches what has not yet happened—as demanding an intellectual athleticism of its audience. It is not simply that readers or viewers of speculative fiction encounter creatures and worlds that do not yet exist and to which they must acclimate, but that they navigate a paradox unique to the genre--- encountering that which is neither impossible nor possible. The subjunctive experience of speculation means sliding between these two poles as we constantly compare what we know of actuality to the proposed world before us. In turn, the bizarre becomes familiar while the familiar also becomes bizarre.

Because of this unique engagement with the neither-impossible-nor-possible, speculative fiction has been a fruitful genre for artists and activists alike to imagine what could be, rather than what cannot. Speculation invites communities to envision beyond/outside the limits of the present and insist on the existence of alternate realities and worlds. In pursuing these hidden possibilities and occluded horizons, it has been imperative for trans scholars to continue to attend to the aesthetic and the affective, not simply marking our representation within the “quagmire of the present” (Muñoz) but theorizing how speculation poetically shifts (cárdenas) our given reality, inviting us to “sense transgender” (Keegan) and thereby demand new worlds. By insisting on a reality where gender and sex are no longer affixed to bodies through biological determinism or the cissexist state, transness itself is a speculative mode that renders “what does not fit present logics perceptible, even if not recognizable” (Keeling). Within trans speculation, sex and gender are made less familiar and the given world is made strange, precisely because we see more of what they already could be. In this sense, all trans elaborations are a kind of speculative fiction, “inextricably hooked into the register of the real” (Prosser).

Recent historical studies have returned to earlier feminist and queer speculative fictions and/or fandoms, including those of Delany and Russ, to make the alternative possibilities of sex and gender feel more real (Ahmed, Lothian, Samer). In this same vein, this TSQ issue seeks to encourage and support historical, theoretical, and creative work on trans speculative media and fiction at a time when it is needed most. For many of us, contemporary trans life is defined by “future fatigue,” a feeling of temporal and political dysphoria that saturates the lag time between our recognition as transgender subjects and the emergence of a society that would permit us to exist. Knowing the present may be all we get (Malatino), this TSQ issue turns to speculative media and fiction for models of T4T praxis that might sustain us during this paradoxical interregnum. In the face of those who confidently declare the cis, straight, colonial future of the nation-state the only permitted reality, we call for submissions of articles, essays, and creative works that engage with the subjunctively trans properties of speculative media, narratives, and aesthetics, including (but not limited to) studies of:

Trans-authored speculative film, literature, art, TV, games, and other media
Trans approaches to the study of speculative film, literature, art, TV, games, and other media
Trans SF fandom
Trans organizing via speculative fiction
Trans revisionist histories of SF and SF fandom
Speculative trans media theory
Trans historiographical and methodological studies by way of speculative fiction

We welcome scholarly articles 4000-7000 words in length. We also welcome shorter essays 1000-2000 words in length, poetry, artwork, short stories, scripts or script excerpts, and other creative work that fits the theme. Scholars, artists, and activists are all invited to contribute.

To submit a manuscript, please visit https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/dup-tsq. Please note that TSQ, like other Duke University Press Journals, has moved to ScholarOne, replacing the prior Editorial Manager platform. If this is your first time using ScholarOne, please register first, then proceed with submitting your manuscript. If you have any difficulties with the process, contact the journal at tsqjournal at gmail.com. All manuscripts must be double-spaced, including quotations and endnotes, and blinded throughout. You must also submit an abstract, keywords, and biographical note at the time of initial submission. Please visit the editorial office's website for a detailed style guide.

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is an academic journal edited by Francisco J. Galarte, Jules Gill-Peterson, and Abraham B. Weil, and published by Duke University Press. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. For most volumes one issue of TSQ is a non-themed open call, with the other three issues devoted to special themes; every issue also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces. To learn more about the journal and see calls for papers for other special issues, https://femresin.unm.edu/transgender-studies-quarterly/

Please send complete submissions by January 10, 2024.

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 11.4: General Open-Call

Editor: Francisco J Galarte

TSQ welcomes submissions for the General Open-call, non-themed issue in the form of:

Research articles (4,000-7,000 words)
Reviews (less than 4,000 words)—approval needed from the editor before submission;
Visual art (300dpi or greater);
Syllabi and teaching materials.
Scholars, artists, and activists are all invited to contribute.

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is an academic journal edited by Francisco J. Galarte, Jules Gill-Peterson, and Abraham B. Weil, and published by Duke University Press. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. For most volumes one issue of TSQ is a non-themed open call, with the other three issues devoted to special themes; every issue also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces. To learn more about the journal and see calls for papers for other special issues, https://femresin.unm.edu/transgender-studies-quarterly/

Please send complete submissions by October 26, 2023.

**TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 11.3: Trans* Ecologies**

Guest editors: Erin L. Durban and Megan Moore

Eva Hayward (2022) inquires, “Can trans mean anything to ecology? If so, what?” The guest editors of this issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly offer Hayward’s question as an invitation to artists, activists, and scholars to consider the possibilities of combining trans* analytics and undisciplined environmental and ecological thinking. The issue follows the Queer & Trans Ecologies Symposium that took place at the University of Minnesota in spring 2023.

Ecology as a concept holds within itself many paradigms that are becoming increasingly mangled by the quality of crises emerging in this post-pandemic world. Arising out of both evolutionary theory and organicist thought, ecology came to challenge the mechanistic cosmologies of early modernists who believed there to be linear, inner logics to living forms that operated akin to machines. Yet ecology has also found itself tossed back and forth between the nature-technics divide, or the question of how the inorganic relates to the organic, as ecological thought often incorporates the inorganic within its tracing of organic systems. Thus, at the heart of ecological problems are questions of control, agency, and the power of organic (or perhaps cosmic) flows to transform life. The growth of ecology as a discipline took off in the mid-20^th century in conjunction with the field of cybernetics, both attempting to do “systems theory” and reconfigure questions of social control in the post-WWII era. Ecology’s resurgence in popularity today can be seen as connected to the technological quality of the present ecological disasters; how to relate to mass death and destruction when it spirals through systems, how to understand technological change alongside climate change, how to conjure a political “we” that has the agency to shift ecosystems. Responses to these questions arrive in the concepts of “non-natural ecologies” (Peter K. Haff), “technoecology” (Eric Hörl), and “cosmotechnics” (Yuk Hui) that attempt different versions of re-conceptualizing the problems imparted by the nature-technics divide via non-modern ontologies. While this literature finds itself converging with feminist thought in its exploration of non-rationalist “relations”, trans*ness brings up questions about relationships between technology, reproduction, and the body that are themselves ecological questions. How can one think techniques of changing the body as emerging with one’s environment and access? What can trans*ness offer this re-conceptualizing of the nature-techne divide?

While there is a growing literature in “trans* ecologies,” this relatively new area of inquiry is still in formation. Therefore, the potential perspectives, subjects, and themes of this work are an open question—the list below of topics is meant to be generative rather than prescriptive or confining. However, the guest editors encourage intersectional submissions with an analysis of power that are informed by related fields of Black ecologies, ecofeminism, feminist science and technology studies, queer ecology, decolonial ecologies, abolition ecologies, and crip ecologies.

What can trans* embodiments, engagements, perspectives, and activism as well as the provocations of trans* studies teach us about…

Air
Animals and animalities
Atmosphere
Biomes
Biospheres
Capitalism and extractive economies
Climate change
Colonialism and imperialism
Conservation
Ecocriticism and environmental literature
Ecological theory
Ecosystems
Elements
Environmental art
Environmental discourse
Environmental justice
Environmental policy and politics
Environmental racism
Extinction
Field research
Food
Fungi
Health
Land
Lawns and gardens
Life
Multispecies relations
Microbiomes
Militarism
“Natural Sciences”
Naturopathy
Natural history museums
Parks
Plants and Botanicals
Pollution
Public spaces
Recreation and leisure
Spatial politics
States of matter
Taxidermy
Taxonomies
Toxicity
Water
“Waste”
Weather?

Likewise, in what ways can critical environmental and ecological thinking generate new possibilities for trans* studies and politics?

We welcome submissions to “Trans* Ecologies” in the form of:

Research articles (5,000-7,000 words);
Reviews (less than 5,000 words)—approval needed from editors before submission;
Creative fiction and nonfiction;
Visual art (300dpi or greater);
Syllabi and teaching materials.

Reading resources are listed at http://www.queerandtransecologies.com.

Send any questions about submissions to qtecologies@umn.edu.

Please send complete submissions by September 1, 2023.