Queer Futures

As we are living the end of world(s), the task of imagining an end to murderous, extractive systems under capitalism continues to be daunting. In their pervasiveness and grip over every aspect of our lives, those systems seem ever-lasting, preceding and succeeding the end of the world. Because of their breadth, we are unwillingly entangled in them: we accommodate their whims and infrastructures so we can survive, we invest our resources, labor force, and time to reform them and make them more inclusive, to the extent that their end can also seem the end of us. Yet, there might have not been a time in history when queer futures were imagined with such fierceness and radical promise.

The conversation on futurity, world-making, utopia, and abolitionism has taken place in geographical proximity to imperial powers, where masses of people (mostly from migrant and working class communities) are racialized for capitalist or settler colonial profit. In many contexts of the Global South, including in West Asia and North Africa, we continue to live disastrous collapses (economic, military, as well as environmental) as a result of this global world order. We have also had to stand against authoritarian regimes and governmental structures that are complicit with extractivism and profit maximization, depleting lives and resources in the process. These highly securitized regimes use surveillance, punishment, and mass incarcerations to tame dissent, instrumentalize legality and citizenship in order to stymy migration and worker movements organizing, and control productive and reproductive labor in order to self-sustain. In other words, our queer resistance has always been at the center world-making and abolitionist projects, even when it was not named as such.

We consider queer futures to be both a practice, a method, and a way of doing/being that extend across disciplines and areas of life. In this issue, we invite contributions, in any form or content, that take one side: that of abolition and the building of another world. We ask: How to abolish capitalism without reforming capitalism? How to imagine queer futures without compromise or state-sanctioned pragmatism? What is accountability that doesn’t look like punishment? How to queer and bring home the conversation around world-making and world-buidling?

The deadline for submission is Thursday, December 15, 2022. The issue is slated for publication in June 2023.

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

We encourage submissions in Arabic, and can also accept texts in English, French, and Spanish. In light of our commitment to extend our transnational work, we also welcome contributions from South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia/the Pacific, among other contexts of the South.

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