Prose Studies Special Issue Call for Papers: “Struggle & Hustle: Queer Nonfiction Prose”
Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism invites submissions for a special issue devoted to exploring trans and queer mutual aid, support, and networks in all genres and periods of nonfiction prose. This issue seeks to delve into the ways in which trans and queer writers have mobilized nonfiction prose to make visible marginalized identities, disseminate underground knowledge, and fashion networks of care and family.
From Victorian pamphlets on "female husbands" to contemporary web-based grassroots medical guides like Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, trans and queer people have long both been written about and written popular nonfiction prose. Such writing has both served to create fraught narratives of pathology and, often simultaneously, enabled LGBTQIA+ people of diverse lived experiences to reflect their realities and write themselves and their communities into being.
Likewise, in memoirs like Janet Mock's Redefining Realness and Jacob Tobia's Sissy, nonfiction prose's sense of immediacy and materiality works to insist on the self-defined reality of people who challenge conventional notions of the gender, sexuality, gender expression, race, disability, class, geography, size, immigration status, sex work, and to imagine what a thriving self and community can look like.
Moreover, in this context, LGBTQIA+ nonfiction prose must be considered in terms of the material conditions of its production, including queer and trans presses and editors.
Topics of interest might include, but are not limited to:
- Social and medical advice manuals by, for, and/or about LGBTQIA+ people
- LGBTQIA+ organizations and their publications
- Colonial/post-colonial trans and queer identities
- Writing the self in queer and trans memoir
- Queer and trans networks in magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, and zines
- Digital representations and networks of LGBTQIA+ identities
- Historic and contemporary tensions between "queer" and "trans"
- Queering and transing prose archives
- Charting LGBTQIA+ genealogies through nonfiction prose
- Legal and medical nonfiction prose and LGBTQIA+ people
- LGBTQIA+ visual culture and nonfiction prose
- Protest and activist ephemera from ACT UP to Black Lives Matter
- Pandemic LGBTQIA+ isolation and/or networks of care
About the Journal:
Prose Studies (https://bit.ly/prosestudiesaims) is a peer-reviewed journal devoted to the study of nonfiction prose in all historical and contemporary contexts. The journal is committed to publishing rigorously argued scholarship from diverse theoretical and interpretive approaches.
To Submit: Please send article proposal abstracts of 500 words to Lisa Hager (hagerl@uwm.edu) by the extended deadline of August 13, 2021. Early submission is welcome as are queries or letters of interest.
Completed manuscripts of 8,000–9,000 words will be due February 1, 2022.