"The Ministry of Health warns that smokers are liable to die young"

We live in ecosystems that are threatened with extinction. While the environmental crisis is pervasive and universal, people from the Global South and from poorer contexts bear a disproportionate share of the burden of the degradation of life. A queer lens stands in opposition to the global discourse that is shaped by the policies of those who cause disasters: the major capitalist nation-states and their accolytes, including the regimes and governments of South states. Not only do the people have to deal with the consequences of these policies (climate change, water scarcity, desertification, air pollution, disruption of natural systems, the spread of epidemics and diseases, etc.), but they are also held responsible for the degradation of the environment, in an attempt to distract from the root of the problem. This strategy deviates our attention from the systems that destroy and vampirize our ecosystems in order to continue to thrive.

The title of this dossier is an attempt at capturing the surreal audacity of governments and stakeholders whose policies systematically exterminate life on earth in the name of capitalist profit and expansion. Therefore, this dossier hopes to redirect our anger against the systems and regimes that are killing us. As economic policies deplete our ecosystems, as militarization and imperial expansion are more concerned with oil, power, and control than with our livelihood, we would like to reflect on the urgency to organize and resist so we might break free.

How do we fight back against the systematic destruction of the environment, our lives, and our freedoms? How do we dismantle the myth of “rescue” policies that only protect the capitalist interests of those in power? How do we plan to recover our lands, our survival, and our right to choose healthy lifestyles, while preserving our resources?

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• How do we think about environmental crises through a queer lens?
• Queering ecofeminism by looking at ecosystems as intersecting in the fight against of heteropatriarchy and capitalism
• The organic relationship between environmental and class anger
• The lived realities of the South bearing the consequences of environmental degradation, and the waves of migration, refuge, and displacement in the world
• The militarization of the environmental crisis: turning resource-rich countries into camps/battlefields to profit local and international loci of power at the expense of the people
• A critique of the global discourse that attempts to solve environmental problems by perpetuating the untouchability of the nation-state and its racist and exclusionary policies
• The link between the domination of nature and life in all its forms, and the systematic restriction of movement and freedoms
• Settler colonialism and its exploitation/destruction of land and indigenous populations
• Debunking and opposing the greenwashing strategies of the Israeli occupation
• Radical ecology and violence as resistance against the systematic destruction of the environment

We accept submissions on a rolling basis. For a publication in November 2022, the deadline for submission is August 31, 2022. After that date, we will continue to accept submissions for later publication.

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.

To submit, please send your contribution to submit@kohljournal.press as a .doc or .docx file, with “Submission Dossier 3” as the subject of your e-mail.

If accepted for inclusion, please note that your paper will be translated to a second language by our team.