Call for submissions: Queer Crossings in Belligerent Times

Problematizing borders has always been a central tenet of queer thinking and scholarship, with emphasis varying over time. In the 1990s, early queer theory challenged established categories of gender and sexuality. In the 2000s, queer theory critiqued homonationalisms and the complicities in the construction of an unbridgeable civilisational gap between purportedly advanced and backward societies, particularly in the context of the “war on terror”. Similar critiques have subsequently been articulated in the context of migration and border control, particularly between Europe and war-torn Middle-East. The "migrant crisis” was reframed as a crisis of the postcolonial world order instead of a crisis of European borders. Finally, the shift in the public response to a new, intra-European wave of war-induced forced migration, from Ukraine, has further highlighted the significance of distinction; questions of racialization, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in refugee (non)reception. While queer as a political concept seeks to counter and rethink norms and poses a challenge to established boundaries, the boundaries of queerness itself need to be interrogated. How are various lines drawn across /within and around queer communities?

 

Our special issue of the SQS Journal mobilises the contention between the concepts of queer and borders, particularly against the backdrop of times of violence and war that accentuate and sharpen various borders. Belligerence, however, is not confined to national borders in war zones but, for example, the much-debated polarization of political landscapes within so-called liberal democracies involves uncompromising, abjecting and violent positionalities against “others” - queer, ethnic, liberal or otherwise. What happens to queer ideals of openness under such pressure? Are cross-identity mobilization, fluid militantism and thinking beyond conventional norms of factionalism and belligerence in hope of creating new orders of peace and (co)existence still possible? 

 

Submissions may cover themes such as:

• Migration and queer exile – Nationality and queerhood 
• Risk and exile in norms: migration beyond the territorial, for example as (ad)venturous departure from (homely and conventional) norms. 
• Queering politics in hot and cold wars 
• Alliances and sympathies, how political ideologies and narratives travel across boundaries 
• Humanitarian law between patriarchy, patronizing narcissism and meaning-making of equity/equality.   
• Gaps and silences:  Erasures in the construction of the national, multi-cultural and queer selfhood.

 

SQS invites submissions for peer-reviewed articles (not to exceed 70 000 characters), editorially managed review articles (35 000), opinion pieces and commentaries (21 000) as well as book reviews for the special issue. The journal publishes texts written in English, Swedish and Finnish.

 

Please, submit your full text manuscript in the online submission portal at journal.fi (requires registration) no later than 23 April, 2023. For information on how to submit, see https://journal.fi/sqs/about/submissions.

 

The article manuscripts go through peer review. For a successful editorial process, please note that revision requests to most submissions are common. Should you like to have advice or an opinion on an idea for an article ahead of writing, please, send the editors of the special issue an abstract of 200-300 words, Ali Ali (ali.ali(a)Helsinki), Salla Aldrin-Salskov (salla.aldrinsalskov(a)helsinki.fi) and Jan Wickman (jan.wickman(a)helsinki.fi) before 23 January. For any other inquiries, too, please do not hesitate to contact the editors.

 

SQS is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, published by the Society for Queer Studies in Finland. Please find the previous issues of SQS since 2005 at https://journal.fi/sqs/issue/archive.
Society for Queer Studies in Finland was founded in Helsinki in 2004, and it is a member of the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies.