Call for Papers: Queer Science Fictions

Vintage Robots APNWriting from Below is an online, open-access, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary, intermedia gender, sexuality and diversity studies journal.

Incited by recent conversations and controversies concerning queers and queerness in popular science fiction, Writing from Below will be joined by special guest editor Nike Sulway (Rupetta, 2013) for a special themed issue on queer science fiction. The future beckons with a queer fist, and they need you to write it.

Writing from Below seek critical and creative works in any publishable format or medium on any aspect of queer science fiction and/or its critique in art, society and culture. They 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…

Do not be limited. Like your forebears: Be brave. Play with form, style, and genre. Invent, demolish, reimagine. Writing from Below welcome submissions from across (and outside of, against and up against) the disciplinary spectrum, inside and outside of conventional academia.

Topics might include (but should not be limited to):

  • Representations of queerness in science fiction, across various mediums (song, dance, literature, film, visual arts)
  • The history of queer science fiction, its legacies and our inheritances
  • 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
  • Bodies and texts in science fiction: non-human queerness, post-humanist queerness, queerness without bodies
  • Dildos and deathrays: sex, sexuality and technology
  • Queers Destroy/Destory Science Fiction: canons and cannons

Submissions
Written submissions, whether critical or creative, should be between 3,000 and 8,000 words in length, and should adhere to the 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. All submissions – critical, creative, and those falling in between; no matter the format or medium – will be subject to a double-blind peer review. Submissions close: 1 September 2016.

Reviews
Writing from Below are also seeking reviews of contemporary science fiction film, television, theatre, live or recorded music, artwork or exhibition, etc. We typically publish longer review-essays of between 1000 and 2000 words, and again encourage generic and stylistic experimentation.

For more information (including detailed submission guidelines and procedures), editorial and review enquiries, or questions about unusual submissions, visit: www.writingfrombelow.org.au for details.