Call for Submissions

Series title: Queer Intersections / Southern Spaces
Series editor: Eric Solomon, PhD
Submission deadline: This is an ongoing series.
Submission requirements: 350–500 word proposals OR full projects
Send submissions and direct all inquiries to: Series editor Eric Solomon (seditor@emory.edu)

Southern Spaces, a peer-reviewed, multimedia, open access journal, invites scholars, critics, writers, artists, and activists to submit essays, photo essays, original documentaries, and digital projects for a new series: “Queer Intersections / Southern Spaces.”

In a 2013 short manifesto, “Stomp for the Shadows,” filmmaker Pratibha Parmar defines the word QUEER via an acronym: Queer, Unspoken, Embolden, Erased, Reclaimed.¹Pratibha Parmar, “Stomp for the Shadows,” GLQ 19, no. 4 (2013): 567. In Parmar’s radical formulation of the category “queer,” the term becomes less a concrete noun denoting states of being, in which gathered under the umbrella of “queer” are LGBTQ+, and more a verb of doing: speaking or not speaking, emboldening or not emboldening, erasing or making visible, reclaiming or failing to claim, and finally queering or not queering. In this way, to queer is to exist as subjects in the transitive space of choice between doing and not doing. The question shifts from identifying queer subjects as intelligible, fixed beings to asking the critical questions: To queer what? Where? When? What do, or should, we queer and why?

With the series “Queer Intersections / Southern Spaces,” Southern Spaces welcomes submissions from scholars, activists, and artists who stand in this intersectional space and raise these critical questions. Southern Spaces asks contributors to consider what ways of being and doing (real and imagined) exist at the intersections of LGBTQ+ identity within locations across southern spaces and the Global South. We invite contributions from writers and creators of any orientation whose work addresses the lives of LGBTQ+ persons and/or applies queer and feminist theory to various topics. We encourage a diversity of methods and theoretical approaches.

All submissions must be original work. Although we expect submissions to consider space, place, and LGBTQ+ subjects critically in relation to the series, the list of possible topics to consider includes (but is not limited to):

• Spaces and Identities​
  • Intersectionality, hybridity, identity: race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, regional identity, and class
  • Migration narratives, globalization, queer diaspora, and spaces of sexuality
  • Public and private spheres and the development of queer subcultures
  • Urban/rural and digital: gentrification, shifts in LGBTQ+ enclaves, and the importance of digital apps/dating in queer space and practice
  • Lesbian, Transgender, and Bisexual southern experiences
  • Gender identity and performance
• Canons and Questions
  • Histories of sexuality in critical and popular thought
  • Identity politics in site-specific contexts
  • Pedagogy and the academy’s responsibility to LGBTQ+ subjects
  • Queer theory and feminist theory (pasts, presents, futures)
  • Reconsidering the queer theory canon (Foucault, Butler, Sedgwick, and other foundational theorists)
• Social Justice and Public Policy
  • Violence, vulnerability, and precarity, perhaps with a particular emphasis on Trans women of color in southern spaces
  • Hate crimes and legal protections
  • Incarceration, institutionalization, and sexual violence
  • Pulse and its aftermath
  • Employment, discrimination, and the law
  • Movement reflections: after “Don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT), after marriage legalization, etc., what next?
• Health, Affect, Memory
  • Biopolitics and public health
  • HIV/AIDS, seropositivity, stigma, PreP and TasP
  • Disability
  • Safer sex, sex positivity, and radicalism
  • Intimacy, love, and affect
  • Memory, loss, mourning, and memorial practices
• Queer Activism
  • Development, evolution, and futures of gay rights movements
  • Resistance and queer counter-narratives
  • Queer(ing) ethics and morality
  • Faith, religion, and spirituality
• Media and Genre Analyses​
  • Film and video (Queer Cinema)
  • Literary studies
  • Art, visual rhetoric, and representation
  • Archives: reclamations and erasures

Examples

The following pieces and our “Queer Souths” educational resource provide examples of the critical, interdisciplinary, and multimedia engagement with LGBTQ+ subjects that this series seeks to expand:

• Bibler, Michael. “Same-Sex Intimacy in Fiction about Southern Plantations.” Southern Spaces, July 8, 2009. https://ssredesign.ecdsdev.org/2009/same-sex-intimacy-fiction-about-southern-plantations.
• Chenault, Wesley, Andy Ditzler, and Joey Orr. “Discursive Memorials: Queer Histories in Atlanta’s Public Spaces.” Southern Spaces, February 26, 2010. https://ssredesign.ecdsdev.org/2010/discursive-memorials-queer-histories-atlantas-public-spaces.
• Chesnut, Saralyn, Amanda C. Gable, and Elizabeth Rose Anderson. “Atlanta’s Charis Books and More: Histories of a Feminist Space.” Southern Spaces, November 3, 2009. https://ssredesign.ecdsdev.org/2009/atlantas-charis-books-and-more-histories-feminist-space.
• Solomon, Eric. “Queer Memory: Loss, Martyrs, and Memorialization in Southern Florida.” Southern Spaces, August 11, 2016. https://ssredesign.ecdsdev.org/2016/queer-memory-loss-martyrs-and-memorialization-southern-florida.

This is an ongoing series. Please submit proposals (350–500 words) or full projects to series editor Eric Solomon (seditor@emory.edu). There is no submission fee or article processing charge. Visit our submissions page for more information.