*Call for Papers, Poetry and Prose*
*WSQ Special Issue, Spring 2015: CHILD*
*Guest Editors: Sarah Chinn and Anna Mae Duane*
Children have always been fraught subjects for feminist scholarship. Women
are alternately infantilized and subsumed in service of children. Indeed,
nowhere are women’s rights more assiduously attacked than around the
question of their biological capacity to bear and raise children. Our
concerns in this issue of *WSQ*, though, are children and childhood
themselves: representations of children, children’s experiences, and
children’s place in the world.
Recent scholarship in childhood studies has taken on core assumptions
around children, especially children’s innocence and their removal from the
realm of work and financial gain. And yet children play a crucial role in
the global economy. As consumers, children represent an immense market. As
producers and workers, children manufacture goods of every kind. Children
constitute a significant stream of bodies for trafficking networks of
domestic and other kinds of labor, including sex work. And children tried
as adults populate prison systems around the world, especially in the
United States.
Children’s identification with potentiality and futurity has reached
proportions unimaginable only decades ago. Developments in prenatal imaging
technology has solidified the “fetal child” as a subject, and trends in
neuroscience have renaturalized the concept of binary gender in newborns
and young children. At the same time, children are identifying as queer and
transgender at earlier ages. How do we understand children’s gendered and
erotic desires? How is childhood gender expression made to stand in for or
retrospectively understood as sexuality, and how are childhood sexual
desires precursors to and divergences from adult sexual identities?
Finally, what is the affective work that children do? They are supposed to
give adult lives meaning and pleasure, to represent a world larger than the
one at hand, to be the source and recipients of love. How is this affective
work inflected by nation, race, class, and gender? Which children have
affective value and which ones are outside the ecology of care and love?
Some of the topics we’re interested in exploring from a feminist/gender
perspective include, but are not limited to:
– Children and the Nation
– The Child as a Consumer
– Children as Economic Actors
– The Child and Memory
– The Child and Trauma
– The Gendered Child
– The Racialization of Children
– Children in the Carceral State
– Gendering Childhood Disability
– Children and Education
– Immigration and Childhood
– Childhood and Sexuality
– Children and Social/Digital Media
– Adoption: Transnational and Domestic, Transracial
– Rights of the Child and Human Rights
Scholarly articles should be sent to guest issue editors Sarah Chinn and
Anna Mae Duane at WSQChildIssue [at] gmail.com byApril 7, 2014. P*lease
send complete articles, not abstracts*. Submissions should not exceed 6,000
words (including un-embedded notes and works cited) and should comply with
the formatting guidelines at
http://www.feministpress.org/wsq/submission-guidelines.
Poetry submissions should be sent to WSQ’s poetry editor at WSQpoetry [at]
gmail.com by April 7, 2014. Please review previous issues of WSQ to see
what type of submissions we prefer before submitting poems. Please note
that poetry submissions may be held for six months or longer. Simultaneous
submissions are acceptable if the poetry editor is notified immediately of
acceptance elsewhere. We do not accept work that has been previously
published. Please paste poetry submissions into the body of the e-mail
along with all contact information.
Fiction, essay, and memoir submissions should be sent to WSQ’s
fiction/nonfiction editor at WSQCreativeProse [at] gmail.com by April 7,
2014. Please review previous issues of WSQ to see what type of submissions
we prefer before submitting prose.
Please note that prose submissions may be held for six months or longer.
Simultaneous submissions are acceptable if the prose editor is notified
immediately of acceptance elsewhere. We do not accept work that has been
previously published. Please provide all contact information in the body of
the e-mail.
