WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly

Call for papers for a special issue on : TRANS-
Guest editors: Paisley Currah, Lisa Jean Moore, and Susan Stryker
Abstracts due: October 1, 2007

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 both
of 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