Calls for Papers, Poetry and Artwork: BODY MATTERS, WSQ
Since 1972, Women's Studies Quarterly (WSQ) has been an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of emerging perspectives on women, gender and sexuality. This special issue of WSQ takes this question as the starting point to consider the ways in which the physical body (re)defines feminist scholarship, art, and activism in light of environmental, political, and global emergencies and transformations taking hold at the present moment.
This special issue aims to explore the body marked by “intersectional” (Crenshaw) identities as a site of social and political violence but also as the vehicle for resistance, triumph, and “decolonial” (Tuck and Yang) justice. Herein lies an opportunity to reflect upon the demand Angela Davis puts forward in “Racism, Birth Control, and Reproductive Rights”: “What is urgently required is a broad campaign to defend the reproductive rights of all women—and especially those women whose economic circumstances often compel them to relinquish the right to reproduction itself” (356). With this call for papers, we invite contributors to annex Davis’s demand and imagine what kinds of futures are possible when we center our advocacy around the rights of Black and Indigenous trans, nonbinary, disabled, queer, working poor, displaced, incarcerated, and migrant individuals/communities and follow the guidance and leadership of the Global Majority.
Submissions might attend to questions such as: What does it mean to place physical bodies and embodiment at the center of feminist labor? What politics are at play when the body is seen, defined, counted, policed, touched, or modified? How is discourse/activism made more urgent when we place the focus on the bodies at work? What kinds of meaningful paths forward may be forged by thinking of human bodies in connection to/as extensions of flora and fauna? How do marginalized bodies survive/thrive beyond the strictures of late-stage capitalism? What strategies aid us in exposing/dismantling the very neoliberal discourses that mark our bodies as Other via race, gender, ability, class, location, and citizenship?
WSQ accepts submissions in all printable media, including academic articles, memoir, manifesto, literary fiction or other prose, poetry, and visual art. Especially encouraged to submit are scholars, artists, creative writers, and activists who themselves experience various forms of marginalization within nation-states in the Global North and Global South.
Priority Deadline: September 2, 2024
