Appel à contribution : « Transgender art and cultural production »

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly
vol.1, no.4: « Trans Cultural Production »

CFP Deadline: Apr 15, 2013

The arts have served as a cultural arena for imagining, creating, and proliferating transgender experiences and communities around the world. As part of its inaugural year, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (pub. Duke University Press) will feature a special issue examining trans cultural production in art, film, dance, design, architecture, literature, and music. We seek papers that critically analyze the current state, history, and significance of these expressive forms as they address, depict, and are mobilized by trans subjects broadly defined, including people whose gender/sex expression is not informed primarily by contemporary Western constructions and conventions. The issue will feature trans makers and communities alongside essays exploring cultural production by non-trans makers as such production impacts trans lives, trans politics, and/or trans theory. We invite submissions exploring the repercussions and resonances of trans representation in non-trans contexts as well as work developing trans interpretations of creative work not originally intended to engage specifically trans people or concerns.

Rather than a survey of best practices or major figures, the issue aims to offer a forum to examine the wider issues attending to the representation of trans in the arts and to demonstrate the value of trans as a heuristic lens for interpreting creative work more generally. While the focus of the issue is scholarly research, we also hope to include a small selection of shorter, less formal essays that engage with critical issues in trans cultural production from curatorial, marketing, and practitioner perspectives.

Possible areas of inquiry include but are not limited to:

– the history of transgender/transsexual/gender-nonconforming representations in the arts and their varying receptions
– trans living as aesthetic practice
– transnational receptions and interpretations of gender and sexual representations
– the dominance of autobiography and portraiture in the history of trans representations in the West; new directions for cultural production
– the imag(in)ing of new bodily morphologies
– bioarts
– trans performance/trans performers
– examinations of trans cultural production that do not rely on the representation of human bodies
– the imaging of trans communities, both real and utopian
– the effects of the global circulation of trans cultural production; the mainstreaming of particular trans visibilities
– distinctions and convergences between trans and queer interpretative approaches to the arts
– the marketing and circulation of trans fiction, self-help literature, and other print media
– curating trans communities
– trans as remix and appropriation (e.g. in relation to mainstream film, advertising imagery, fashion and/or music)
– trans embodiment as/in relation to artistic form
– case studies of specific locales or sites that have supported trans* artistic communities

To be considered, please send submissions by April 15, 2013, to tsqjournal@gmail.com along with a brief bio including name, postal address, and any institutional affiliation. Completed texts are encouraged, but an abstract may also be submitted in lieu of a full paper.  Abstracts should be no more than 250 words and should include a brief statement of work completed on or relevant to the submission. Illustrations should be included with both completed submissions and abstracts.

Accepted authors will be contacted in May, with the full text of all submissions due October 1, 2013.  The expected range for scholarly articles is 5000 to 7000 words and 1000 to 2000 words for shorter critical essays and descriptive accounts. Peer review will be conducted on all accepted submissions.

Any questions should be addressed by e-mail sent to all guest editors for the issue: Julian Carter (California College of the Arts, juliancarter@cca.edu), David Getsy (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, dgetsy@saic.edu), and Trish Salah (University of Toronto, trish.salah@utoronto.ca).

(Image: Greer Lankton)