The Fan Studies Network

CFP: Queers and Queerness in Science Fiction

Writing from Below seeks submissions for a special themed issue on the poetics and politics of queers and queerness in science fiction. We seek critical and creative works, from any disciplinary perspective, in any format or medium, on the intersection of science fiction with the study of genders and sexualities. We seek to make visible the invisible queer pasts, presents, and futures of science fiction, to critically and creatively cultivate science fictional possibilities pressed into service for the coming of future actual and imagined queer bodies, lives, relationships, communities… and we are especially interested in the sociological perspective—the impacts of science fiction, in its myriad manifestations, on genders and sexualities as experienced, expressed, performed in human societies.

Writing from Below is a peer-reviewed online open-access gender, sexuality and diversity studies journal. We provide a forum for new research on gender and sexuality and the array of intersecting practices, ideologies, and issues that shape their human experience and social expression. For this special issue, topics might include (but should not be limited to):

· The representation of queers, queerness, and same-sex sexualities in science fiction, across various mediums (song, dance, literature, film, visual arts, etc.)

· The history of queer science fiction, its legacies and our inheritances

· The critique of privileged sexual and gender practices in science fiction—discrimination, marginalisation and exclusion; power and coercion

· Queer social movements—their advancement, representation, critique—in science fiction

· Contemporary cultural, social, political, legal, ethical, biological, environmental, and technological issues in gender that science fiction draws attention to and comments on

· Queer geographies, place and space in science fiction

· New modes or models of gender, sexuality, and eroticism articulated through science fiction

· The future of queerness: what will queer be (if it persists) in future science fictions

· Hope, hopelessness, and queer science fictional futures

· Dystopian and utopian representations of futuristic queerness

· Post-humanism and/or trans-humanism, in theory and practice

· Bodies and texts in science fiction: non-human queerness, post-humanist queerness, queerness without bodies; cyborgs and augmented humans; intersexuality and alternative embodied genders

· Dildos and deathrays: sex, sexuality, and technology

· Queers Destroy/Destory Science Fiction: canons and cannons

· Science fiction and/or fan studies, genre studies, game studies, etc.

The future beckons with a queer fist, and we need you to write it. Do not be limited. Like your forebears: Be brave! Play with form, style, and genre. Invent, demolish, reimagine. We welcome submissions from any field which intersects with the study of gender, sexuality, and diversity. We publish traditional academic research as well as less conventional creative forms of research—we love to encourage scholarly experimentation.

We are open for submissions until 7 November 2016. Please visit the Writing from Below website for more information, and to submit your work: http://www.writingfrombelow.org.au.

Dr Quinn Eades
Managing Editor
Q.Eades@latrobe.edu.au

Dr Stephen Abblitt
Managing Editor
Stephen.Abblitt@open.edu.au

Writing from Below
La Trobe University, Victoria, 3086
http://www.writingfrombelow.org.au

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