This issue’s oxymoronic title, “Inconspicuously Fabulous,” calls attention to the generative tensions, limitations, and potentials of visuality as they pertain to minoritarian subjects. What does it mean to present oneself in and as excess while remaining unseen or unnoticed? Like madison moore, who offers a critical queer-of-color reiteration of economist Thorstein Veblen’s concept of “conspicuous consumption” as grotesque public display of economic power and prestige, we think through negotiated visibility as a survival strategy, or a pleasurable and simultaneously risky method of living as a spectacle in the margins.

The word “fabulous” derives from the Latin “fābulōsus” meaning “celebrated in legend, resembling an invented story, mythical.” To understand fabulousness as taking on the characteristic of fables or invented tales, then, we recognize how minoritarian visual cultures and their constituents work toward alternative world-making. Seminal thinkers like José Esteban Muñoz have attended to fabulous queer ephemera—pamphlets, sequins, and sweats on dancing bodies that glitter in the darkness of night—as fleeting but no less material proof of counterpublics that exist outside of institutional bounds. On the other hand, fabulousness can also confound powers that work to discipline and circumscribe the unruly. Critical surveillance studies scholars like Simone Browne have theorized on the subversive functions of fabulousness to undermine dominant cultural logics and standard algorithms that rely on said logics to contain “blackness that enters the frame.” For instance, Browne’s discussion of artist Adam Harvey’s CV Dazzle project highlights “the productive possibilities that come from being unseen” and the irony of flamboyant camouflage as a means of subverting facial recognition technology.

At a moment when the stakes of demanding perfect visibility from minoritarian subjects continue to escalate, there is an urgent need for cinema and media studies scholarship to reconsider and contend with long-held assumptions about visibility. How might the framework of the inconspicuously fabulous help us to question the fallible promises of neoliberalist representation politics? In what ways do the tensions between the desire to be seen and the material stakes of remaining unseen disrupt ocularcentrist ways of thinking? In studies of minoritarian affects and relations that emerge from within hostile media environments, where do the horizons of limitations and possibilities lie?

We welcome essays that draw from diverse archives and methodologies, book reviews of recent and relevant scholarship, as well as artist contributions that resonate with the issue’s theme, recognizing that the creative works may need to conform to the journal’s print format.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Fictional, alternate, and speculative histories
• The queer art of lying
• Counter-mapping (e.g., Queering the Map)
• Alternative or experimental methods of documenting minoritarian subjects
• Behind-the-scenes footages and deleted scenes
• Ethical redactions
• Pixelation
• PNG as ‘invisible’ image file format
• Improvisational performances and their afterlives
• The queer-of-color underground and its subcultures
• Technologies of surveillance and their failures

Deadline for submission is November 20, 2026.

Decisions, revisions, and notes will be released in January 2027.

Please contact the issue editor Raymond Kyooyung Ra at kyooyung@usc.edu if you wish to discuss or have questions about the submission process.

Spectator is a biannual publication by the University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts, Division of Cinema & Media Studies.  

Manuscripts to be considered for publication should be sent to:

Issue Editor: Raymond Kyooyung Ra

USC School of Cinematic Arts

900 W. 34th St. Suite 320

Los Angeles, CA 90089

kyooyung@usc.edu

Submissions should be e-mailed directly to the issue editor. Manuscripts should include the title of the contribution, name of author(s), postal address, e-mail address, and a phone number for the author who will work with the editor on revisions. Contributions should not exceed 5,000 words. Please include a brief abstract and author bio for publicity purposes.

Articles submitted should not be under consideration by any other journals.

Book reviews may vary in length from 300 to 1,000 words. Please include title of book, retail price, and ISBN at the beginning of the review.

Additional section contributions can include interviews and works about new archival or research facilities as well as newly developed methods related to the field.

Authors should send copies of their work via e-mail as electronic attachments. Files should be formatted in the latest version of Microsoft Word, and endnotes should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style.

Upon acceptance, a detailed format/style sheet will be forwarded to all contributors as to the requirements for the submission of images and text.

Current Board for Spectator

Managing Editor: Luci Marzola

Academic Advisor: J.D. Connor

Issue Editor: Raymond Kyooyung Ra