CFP, Guest-Edited Themed Issue: "Un/Desirable Journeys ←→ Queer Elsewheres: South Asian Imaginaries Across Intersectional Terrain" (Feminist Review Issue 133, March 2023)

Jeff Roy Discussion

Feminist Review is calling for articles and Open Space pieces for a guest-edited themed issue on ‘Un/Desirable Journeys ←→ Queer Elsewheres: South Asian Imaginaries Across Intersectional Terrain’ (Issue 133, March 2023). The submission deadline is 1 October 2021.

Critical scholarship on South Asia has called for renewed attention to the intersections of queerness, race, class and caste under the contexts of globalisation, neoliberalism, and the fraying of cultural and ideological borders (Gopinath, 2005; Prasad, 2017). This guest-edited themed issue draws attention to literal and figurative journeys of queer, trans, hijra, khwaja sira, thirunangai, and gender nonconforming subjects and scholars working in and around South Asia. The Issue adopts a particular focus on areas that have been rendered as marginal in queer scholarship, in order to highlight the ways in which race, class, caste, and religion frame relationships with epistemic and institutional power. Centring performative and narrative modes of reflexive inscription in the social, literary, visual, and performing arts, we invite articles, performances, and artistic projects to consider how marginalities within queerness are rendered as ‘elsewheres’ geopolitically, institutionally, and temporally, even in queer scholarship.

Our aim is to explore what meanings adhere to queerness in its travels, and what happens when it takes on life in underrepresented or under-considered historical, geopolitical, conceptual and cultural locations (Amin, 2017). We invoke the notion of ‘queer elsewheres’ as a way to journey into fields and temporalities that count as not-here/not-yet-here, to explore the sensorial and affective dimensions, ethical issues and methodological limits of such travels (Kasmani et al., 2020; Mittermaier, 2012; Muñoz, 2009). We do so equally to articulate an/other location of intersectional, racialised, and decolonial coalition that emerge when queer subjects, Dalit activists, and black South Asians subvert the homogenising implication of the ‘queer of colour’ taxonomy by visioning across the global colour line. In addressing the connections that bind our respective fields of academic and artistic practice––and our ability to access modes of inquiry based on our varying privilege(s) as ethnographers, artists, or teachers––we further consider, self-reflexively, how these privileges are exercised through epistemic and institutional power.

We invite full articles and Open Space submissions that address this theme before or by 1 October 2021.

If you would like to discuss your ideas for the issue with the editors, please send an email describing your proposed proposed contribution (250 words) with the subject line ‘Queer Elsewheres Issue 133: Expression of Interest’ to feministreview@feministreview.com before or by 1 September 2021. For the sake of maintaining the integrity of blind review, your message will be anonymised before being passed on to the issue’s editorial team. 

For complete submissions details, see the CFP on the Feminist Review website.