CFP: TRANS-

WSQ:  Women's Studies Quarterly

Call for papers: TRANS-

Trans: -gender, -national, -racial, -generational, -genic,, -species. The list could (and does) go on. This special issue of WSQ invites feminist work that explores categorical crossings, leakages, and slips of all sorts, around and through the concept "trans-." While it centrally addresses the challenges presented to traditional feminist scholarship by the transgender movement of the past few decades, it aims to take feminist scholarship in an even more expansive direction by recasting trans- as a more general conceptual operation, and by articulating the interrelatedness and mutual inextricability of various "trans-" phenomena.

This WSQ special issue invites work that situates "trans-" in dialogues beyond those bounded by the politics of identity. The meaning of "transgender" itself has shifted tremendously since the word first began appearing in cross-dresser community publications in late 1960s. By the 1990s, a burgeoning body of trans-historical and cross-cultural literary, documentary, performance, political and anthropological work had developed into the new field of transgender studies (see for example, Currah, Juang and Minter 2006; Stryker and Whittle 2006). This new field linked insights and analyses drawn from the experience or study of transgender phenomena with the central
disciplinary concerns of contemporary humanities and social science research, but our goal with this special issue is to promote cutting-edge feminist work that builds on existing scholarship to articulate new generational and analytical perspectives.

A fundamental assumption of this special issue is that "trans-" can best be understood (can perhaps only be understood) as mutually co-constituitive sets of embodied material practices.  These practices traffic themselves across porous, shifting, and diffuse borders between states and territories, citizens and aliens, representational and abstract, the real and the imaginary, men and women, the clinical and non-clinical, the normal and the pathological, the rational and irrational, human and non-human, the young and the old, living and dead, academic and activist-or that call those very divisions into question. Neither -gender, nor any of the other suffixes of trans-, can be understood in isolation.

While we certainly wish to engage with theoretical scholarship, germinal analyses of policy will also find a home in this special issue. In addition, in keeping with the established format of WSQ and the methodological conventions of feminist scholarship, we also welcome first person narratives, provocations, poetry, and fiction as a means to explore, interpret, and re-consider "trans-." Regardless of methodology or discipline, however, we encourage work that understands the representations and meanings of identities, bodies, movements, and anatomies to accrue particular weights and valences depending on the cultural moments in which they are produced and circulated.  The lines implied by the very concept of "trans-" are moving targets, simultaneously composed of multiple determinants.

Some of the critical operations of trans- that we wish this issue to explore include-
-Original, grounded, empirical analyses of historical or contemporary social formations of trans- embodiments.
-Challenges to biological sexual dimorphism via new reproductive technologies and body modification practices.
-Literary, cultural, film and media criticism on and about trans-representation and performance.
-Feminist analyses of geopolitical and temporal locations and boundary-crossings, including work on individual embodiment as a geopolitical temporality.
-Theoretical and substantive analysis of migration, diaspora, borders, and surveillance as they relate to bodily normativity.
-The increasingly blurred distinctions of human/non-human boundaries, particularly as they relate to emerging biomedical and communicational technologies.
-Emotion Studies, including the "movement" of feelings as depicted or analyzed in phenomenological philosophy, art, poetry, and/or autoethnography.
-Work that examines how the legal, administrative, and bureaucratic processes of sovereign power make trans- bodies live, or let them die Work that rearticulates trans- identities in ways that circumvent  the impasses of identity politics

We invite abstracts from all disciplinary and artistic homes including but not limited to: critical theories of race/gender/sexuality, biomedical fields, literary studies, technology and science studies, legal studies, the social sciences, and the arts and humanities generally.

If submitting academic work, please send abstracts by October 1, 2007 to the guest editors at WSQTransIssue@gmail.com.  If accepted, full papers will be due by January 2, 2008.  Poetry submission should be sent to WSQ's poetry editor Kathleen Ossip, at ossipk@aol.com, by January 2, 2008. Fiction, essay, and memoir submissions should be sent to WSQ's Fiction/Nonfiction editor Kamy Wicoff, at kwicoff@yahoo.com, by January 2, 2008. All art submissions should be sent on CD or floppy disk in a high-resolution (300 dpi or more) JPEG or TIFF image to the following addresses:

Paisley Currah
Department of Political Science
Brooklyn College, CUNY
2900 Bedford Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11210
pcurrah@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Lisa Jean Moore
Purchase College
SS 1010
735 Anderson Hill Road
Purchase, NY 10577
Lisa-jean.moore@purchase.edu

Susan Stryker
Women's Studies Department
Simon Fraser University
8888 University Drive,
Burnaby, B.C. Canada V5A 1S
susanstryker@yahoo.com