What: Trans-Scripts, an interdisciplinary online journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Irvine

When: April 2012 Issue "Queer Interventions and Intersections"

Deadline: Jan 1 (full paper)

Trans-Scripts – a new interdisciplinary online journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences based at the University of California, Irvine – invites graduate students to submit their work for publication. The theme of the second volume will be "Queer Interventions and Intersections."

While some argue that the very nature of "naming" a "queer" critique dismantles its efficacy, we use the term to reference a mode of critical inquiry that has historically worked as and at the limits of the (hetero)normative, interrogating the incoherencies and ambivalences of normative scripts of gender and sexuality, race and class. For many scholars, queer critiques represent an alternative hermeneutics and critical topography that emerges at the limits of regulatory practice and disciplinary formation. Therefore, "queer" emerges as a fluid, protean, and fungible term, one that is in constant formation and acutely aware of its entanglements with and resistance to structures of power within society.

Invariably bound up in discussions of gender, sexuality, race, and class, among other social categories of identity, queerness is a productive and vast critical terrain whose relevance to disciplines as diverse as literature, anthropology, politics, theology, sociology, military studies, disability studies, informatics, geopolitics, pedagogy, and critical race theory cannot be understated. Given the increased attention to queerness and queer theory in academia over the past two decades, we invite submissions that engage with the notions of "queer interventions and intersections" across a variety of registers. Queerness is central to many of the events currently structuring transnational public discourses, from the recognition of "third gender" identity in Nepal and the repeal of the American military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, to Lady Gaga's queer video aesthetics and the mobilization of queer rhetoric in the grassroots movements and political revolutions in the Middle East.

Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:

  • queer bodies and inhabitations/queer cyborgs/disordered bodies/disembodied queers queerness and animal studies

  • posthumanisms queer metacritiques

  • problematizing queer theories

  • cyberqueers/technologizing the queer

  • queer disability studies

  • queer affective lives/queer negativity, queer futurity/anti-futurity

  • queer and feminist methodologies/pedagogies

  • mobilizing queer desires and sexualities/queering desire

  • homonationalism and militarizing queerness/(de)nationalizing queerness (e.g., DADT)

  • trans lives and communities

  • transgender rights movements

  • queer rhetorics and literary queers

  • queer enabling fictions

  • queer poetics/queer lyrics

  • reparative reading and/or anti-histories

  • queer kinships/queering kinships

  • queer geographies and geopolitics, queer spatiality and temporality

  • queer criminality, queer violence

  • the economic crisis and queer communities/queerness and poverty

  • queer aesthetics in popular culture/queer reality television

  • queerness and sports, queerness and health/healthcare

  • transnational queer connectivities and performativities

  • queer ethnographies/queer tourism/movement, queer diasporas

  • queer revolutions/resistances

  • queer mobilizations in the 2011 Middle East revolutions

Trans-Scripts welcomes all submissions that engage topics related to "Queer Interventions and Intersections." They may, but certainly need not, address the examples listed above. As we believe that scholarship from a variety of approaches can help inform contemporary understandings, submissions need not conform to any disciplinary, methodological, temporal, or other criteria. They need only be original, well researched, and properly cited in MLA style. English language contributions from all universities in all countries will be considered. By contributing work, unpublished students can gain experience of the peer-review process and achieve their first publication, while those already published gain further professionalization.

Faculty Contributors

In addition to selected student work, renowned academics will contribute editorial pieces, offering students the chance to place their work in conversation with experts in various fields. Past contributors have included Étienne Balibar, Hortense Spillers, Frank Dikötter, Clarence Lang, and Joy James.

The deadline for submission is January 1, 2012. All submissions should be written in English. The total word count should be between 3,000 and 12,000 words, including footnotes. Explanatory footnotes should be kept to a minimum. Submissions should employ the MLA style of citation (for further information on the journal's submission guidelines and mission statement, see the journal website at http://www.humanities.uci. edu/collective/hctr/trans-scripts/index.html).

Submission Guidelines and Review Process

All pieces should be submitted as a Word document attached in an email to transscriptsjournal@gmail.com. The email should include your name, institution, program/department, and an email address at which you can be contacted. Please also include a short abstract of less than 300 words describing the content and argument of the piece.

Comments and General Inquiries

Please direct all general inquiries about the journal or any comments on published pieces to our 2012 volume's Editor-in-Chief, Jen Kosakowski, at jkosakow@uci.edu.