Queer Feminisms Issue

Extending the call

We are reopening the call for essays, reflections, opinion pieces, testimonies, collective and collaborative writing, audiovisual material, and literary pieces. This call is currently closed to research papers.

General call

We are pleased to invite submissions for the 13^th issue of Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research, slated for publication in December 2020. Young activists, independent researchers, graduate students and fresh graduates are particularly encouraged to apply. We also welcome submissions from seminal contributors in the field.

Following our call for a writing workshop on Queer Feminisms, we continue to contemplate ways to engage with queer feminisms as they have been conceptualized and experienced in Arabic-speaking countries in particular, as well as transnationally. The basis for this is an understanding of “queer” as a political positioning that brings social justice struggles together, rather than a “western” theory that exists in isolation. Hence the question: How do we theorize queer feminisms from our (geo)political localities and situated knowledges? What are the queer feminist fault lines we encounter? What can we learn from queer feminist movements and initiatives working in West Asia and North Africa, and what mechanisms do we put in place for ourselves and each other? How do queer feminisms transform our shared vision of justice?

For this issue of Kohl, we are looking for papers that understand queer theory as part of our histories, collective memory, and feminist futures. We are interested in challenging the boundaries of where theory originates from, and disrupting the notion that our queer knowledges are consumable rather than creative and productive. Finally, we hope to contribute to archival efforts that historicize and make available the organizing experiences of our movements.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Queer as radical: why mainstreaming strategies will never be queer
• Queer as resistance: geopolitics, global trends, and identity/visibility politics
• Queer as grassroots: the limits of NGOization and the cooptation of queerness
• Queer as danger: queer anti-state organizing and surveillance
• Queer as labor: emotional, political, and community work
• Queer labor and the challenge to profitability and capitalist production
• Disrupting social constructs: trans subjectivities and the tensions with normativities
• Queer porn, sex work, and kink: transgressing boundaries
• Queer sexualities and intimacies in (hetero/homo)normative contexts
• Queer theory’s complicated relationship with feminist theory: history and prospects
• Queer feminist movements: mechanisms, forms of solidarity, and transnational affinities
• Queer projects in the MENA: envisioning futurity
• Linguistic pieces on queer theory as it is explored or experienced in native tongues, languages, and dialects of the Global South (for the full call, click here).

In addition to research articles, we consider all forms of written and audiovisual submissions. We will also consider a limited number of transnational submissions from the Global South.

To submit a paper, please send your blinded piece to submit@kohljournal.press as a .doc or .docx file, with “Submission Issue 13” as the subject of your e-mail.

We accept work in progress, provided full drafts are submitted. If accepted for inclusion, please note that your paper will be translated to a second language by our team.