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Call for Papers: South to a Queer Place: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Queer Lives and Southern Sensibilities
| Call for Papers Date: | 2008-09-01 (Archive) |
| Date Submitted: |
2008-06-04 |
| Announcement ID: |
162693 |
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This call for proposals is for an interdisciplinary collection of narratives, tentatively entitled South to a Queer Place: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Queer Lives and Southern Sensibilities, set in the context of the queer South. Essays will be explorations of queer Southernness and Southern queerness. Creative contributions, including personal accounts, oral histories, feminist theory, queer theory, etc., are welcome. Although no one specific methodology or theoretical approach is preferred, essays should 1) critically and carefully examine possible mutually-constitutive intersections of sexuality and Southern place by exploring, as Dews and Law (2001, p. 5) suggest, one’s “own relationship to the South and then self-identify in whatever ways seem meaningful” and 2) comment upon Southern queerness within larger social, cultural, political, religious, economic, etc., contexts. South to a Queer Place moves to situate “southern queerness” in a broader context and may draw upon comparative approaches, such as cross-regional or transnational reflections or analysis.
The collection will explore formations of queer subjects in Southern spaces and examine how those formations might inform conversations across academic disciplines. For example, recognizing that there are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people—all sorts of us—who choose to live our lives in rural settings, Halberstam notes that “it is not always easy to fathom the contours of queer life in rural settings because…queers from rural settings are not well represented in the literature that has been so much a hallmark of twentieth-century gay identity” (2003, p. 164). While Halberstam references rural settings, a similar contention may be made about fathoming the contours of queer life in multiple Southern settings, such as shifting suburban and urban places since conceptions of The South and Southern are as varied and diverse as conceptions of queer. This call for proposals resists defining or delimiting queer; however, authors may find discussions of queerness in Warner (1993), Jagose (1996), Howard (1999), Wilchins (2004), and Whitlock (2007), for example, helpful to their own conceptualizations.
The South is a place with multiple stratifications. It is a contested site, where race, class, gender, religion, and sexuality interact continually and comprehensively, having implications that transcend regional boundaries and play out in a range of public arenas—politics, media, religion, arts. Likewise, our identification with Southern place will be varied, ranging from attachment to ambivalence, from fondness to contempt. Voices of lesbian, gay, transgendered, and bisexual people who were raised and perhaps choose to remain on these landscapes add layers of complication, complexity, and meanings. Those lives lived, sometimes invisibly, within the contexts and contours of Southern place have powerful stories to tell, and this anthology will be a place of storied lives, where greater understanding may be had of what it means to be Southern and queer. The collection will range across academic disciplines and will be a resource for scholars and students in queer studies, American Studies, women’s studies, multicultural studies, among others; it will also be of interest to the general public.
Submissions should include a 3-4 paragraph description of the proposed essay, including information on aims, methodological approach, and the proposed submission’s fit within the scope of the collection. To submit a proposal and/or for more information, please contact Ugena Whitlock, ruwhitlock@yahoo.com. Proposals should be submitted in the body of an email or as a separate Word attachment by September 1, 2008.
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Ugena Whitlock, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Education and Gender Studies
Associate Coordinator, Gender and Women's Studies
Kennesaw State University
1000 Chastain Rd. #0122
Kennesaw, GA 30144
Office: KH 3115
Phone: 770-298-4836
Email: ruwhitlock@yahoo.com
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