The Fan Studies Network

Queering the Whedonverses—a Slayage special issue

Over the last 15 years, Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies and other publications have featured a range of writing and scholarship about queer issues, identity and representations related to the Whedonverses but there has not yet been a publication dedicated solely to queer Whedon studies. A renewed interest in feminism and queer identities in mainstream culture and academia, alongside greater public recognition for LGBTQ issues and more attention being paid to popular culture across media: all suggest that the time is right for a concentrated examination of the Whedonverses from the perspective of queer theory and queer identities as they overlap but also differ, in all their complexity as they exist within an intersectional world. The editors of this Slayage special issue thus invite proposals for papers on any aspect of queerness and the Whedonverses, in specific national or international contexts.

Contributions may focus on, but are not restricted to:
• Queer sex and sexualities
• Queer bodies
• Queering as a discourse or position of subversion or “troubling” normativity
• Queer studies, the Whedonverses, and the academy
• Teaching queer studies via Whedonverse texts
• Subject-specific approaches to queering the Whedonverses
• Intersectional approaches to queerness within the Whedonverses
• Production and creation
• Acting and performance
• Audiences, reception, consumption
• Fan activity and production
• Formats, platforms and media—are some more open to being queered than others?
• Aesthetics (including sound and music)
• Comparative studies of Whedonverse productions, or the Whedonverses and, e.g., the Marvel Universe
• Genres and genre-queering: comedy, musical, melodrama, horror, Gothic, action, science fiction, superheroes
• Tropes, stereotypes and the same old stories
• Cult and mainstream, high and low culture, taste and ‘quality’

Send a 200-300 word proposal and a short bio by 16 December 2016 to Lorna Jowett (lorna.jowett@northampton.ac.uk) and Hélène Frohard-Dourlent (helenefd@gmail.com), who will notify you early in January 2017 if your proposal is accepted. If your proposal is accepted please note that a first draft will be due in April 2017.

CFP: Textual Reception – Exploring Audiences’ Writing Practices from a Gender Perspective (special issue of Genre en séries / Gender in Series)

Whether through fan mail sent to celebrities and the popular press, critical pieces, derivative narratives such as fan fictions and other outlets, media audiences have often chosen writing as a privileged way to extend their experiences of reception. In very different contexts indeed, individuals have written about the cultural objects they loved or execrated, using various media to express themselves. If preserved and accessible, all these texts can reveal a lot about their authors, but also about the composition and structure of the audiences they belong or have belonged to. Above all, they are spaces in which the making of gendered identities and relationships within these audiences can be observed, providing scholars valuable resources to study media reception from a gender perspective.

This special issue of Gender in Series aims to gather works dedicated to the analysis of audience’s writing practices through the lens of gender, broadly speaking, to illuminate both the media cultures and the social discourses produced by these specific audiences. Previous works have already showed how “ordinary”, “domestic” or “fan” writings may be highly gendered and researchers are therefore invited to provide new case studies. Contributions that focus on the writers’ profiles, their writing and, if applicable, publishing conditions, are particularly encouraged, as well as those interested in the social meanings and uses of audience’s texts from individual or collective perspectives. In the line of works that have explored the relation between reading and gender or the construction of identities through mass media, it seems essential to understand how these writings can be means of self-presentation or how they convey ideological representations and determinations about gender. It is all the more important since they are inspired by cultural contents which are themselves embedded within social and gendered norms. Besides, as writing forms continue to have a central role – offline and online – in reception practices, this special issue also welcomes comparative works establishing bridges between different kinds of writing materials or between heterogeneous eras or contexts: identifying the proximities or ruptures within forms of textual reception will be helpful to discuss how media cultures and gender issues interact and how these interactions may change in time.

Contributors should feel free to focus on any type of written textual reception, whatever its content (correspondence, commentary, fiction, etc.) or media (paper, digital, etc.), and whether the texts were supposed to be publicly released or to remain in the private sphere. This special issue wishes to address textual reception in its diversity: articles may deal with objects of affection (or disgust) from literary, musical and audiovisual fields or deal with celebrities related to arts, sports or even politics. Proposals from any of the different social sciences (sociology, history, film and television studies, cultural and media studies, etc.) will be considered, provided the analysis is based on empirical material, derived from archives, ethnographic research and/or digital research. Articles may deal with the most involved amateurs, such as “fans”, but may also focus on more “ordinary” cultural consumers, as long as they have taken a pen or a keyboard to express themselves. Finally, even if studies about writings produced between the end of the nineteenth to the twenty-first century are preferred, more comparative works or approaches relying on older writings will, when appropriate, be taken into account.

Full CFP (with additional research directions, references, and practical information): http://www.thomaspillard.fr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/CFP-Gender-in-Series-Textual-Reception.pdf

(suggested references: http://genreenseries.weebly.com/bibliographie-appel-numeacutero-7.html)

Editors:
– Sébastien François: sebastien.francois@rocketmail.com
– Thomas Pillard: thomas@pillard.nom.fr

Important dates:
– Deadline for submissions: November 30, 2016
– Notification of acceptance or rejection: December 15, 2016
– Reception of full papers: March 1, 2017
– Reviews sent to authors: May 2017
– Reception of final articles: September 1, 2017
– Online publication: Fall 2017

Click to access Call%20for%20papers%20-%20HRC.pdf

Tema: Researching Internet Content

The Internet has recently celebrated it’s 25th anniversary and as Gartner’s hype cycle on emerging technology shows the Internet has already give rise to new, emerging as well as established technologies, platforms, ways of interacting and creating content.

In the humanities we traditionally study cultural content in it’s many different shapes and forms from letters and literature, to paintings and pottery. However, 25 years with the Internet has thoroughly affected the amount, shape, creation of and way we interact with the cultural content found on the Internet. This in turn has influenced the theories as well as the methods with which we can study cultural content. The field of Digital Humanities has built itself around the idea of using digital methods to study more traditional material such as handwritten or analogue documents. However, in recent years there has been a growing focus on the study of born-digital material, using both newly developed digital methods as well as more traditional methods.

This issue will include research papers that deal with methods, possibilities, challenges and in particular ethical considerations in relation to humanities research into Internet content.

This includes, but is not limited to the study of:
fanwork and it’s creators
DIY culture and how-tos
amateur forums
social networks blogs and bloggers

Researchers from any discipline and at any level are invited to submit a 200-word abstracts on this topic by 15 October 2016 to the issue editors, Henriette Roued- Cunliffe (roued@hum.ku.dk) and Thessa Jensen (thessa@hum.aau.dk)

The editorial team will review all abstracts, and authors of selected abstracts will be invited to submit full papers by 1 February 2017.

Important dates:

15 October 2016: deadline for abstracts

1 February 2017: deadline for full paper

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