cfp.english.upenn.edu

Call for Chapters (edited book)

Queer Intersections: Revisiting online media and queer sexualities
Edited by Kate O'Riordan and David J Philips

Introduction
This edited collection will bring together crucial examinations of the intersecting fields of sexuality and the internet, and will provide an overarching contextualisation and consolidation of cyber/queer practices and theories.

In the early to mid-1990s, the repercussions of queer theory were being engaged across academic feminism and lesbian and gay studies. At the same time, the internet was emerging as a key structuring device for academic networks, and as an important area of study. With the advent of the commercial web in 1994 the internet intersected with popular culture, and key questions of modernity - identity, community, governance, time and space - intersected with the web as it unfolded across multiple social domains. Whilst the mid-1990s wasn't the beginning of internet research, cybercultural studies, or queer, it was a period of sustained attention and excitement in relation to identity and the web. Since then, there has been intense collision and collaboration between queer theory and cyberculture, as the imagined ideal queer subject and the imagined ideal cybersubject came to occupy the same ground.

Moving on from and challenging this formulation, the book aims both to document queer internet practices and to limn their theoretical implications at the intersection of the fields of queer, technology, and communication studies. Drawing on interviews with central actors, analyses of internet activity, syntheses of critical debates, and both new and historical research, the collection will provide both an overview and an in depth analysis of these engagements.

We invite papers for consideration that complement either of the proposed sections of the book:

Section 1 will provide theoretical contextualisations, histories and political economies of queer/communication technology intersections.

Section 2 will showcase new and innovative work on queer sexuality and the internet that offers new insight, whilst also showing evidence of a rigorous connection to historical and theoretical context.

Suggested topics and themes include (but are not limited to):

· Sexual identities practices and communities
· Art and activism
· Consumption
· Political economy
· Representation
· Performativity
· Queer theory

Target Market and Readership
The book aims to provide a contribution to course materials for postgraduate and undergraduate work in digital/new media/internet and communication studies, queer theory, cultural and gender studies. The collection also aims to support postdoctoral researchers by providing a consolidation and bridging of existing and new work in the field.

Deadlines
Submission of 400 word abstract along with a CV: 1st of July 2005.
Authors notified: 1st of August 2005
Draft chapters: 1st November 2005

Editors
Kate O'Riordan, Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics, Lancaster University, http://www.cesagen.lancs.ac.uk/staff/oriordan.htm
k.oriordan_at_lancaster.ac.uk

David Phillips, Department of Radio-Television-Film, University of Texas at Austin, http://rtf.utexas.edu/faculty/phillips, djp@mail.utexas.edu

         ==========================================================
              From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
                        CFP_at_english.upenn.edu
                         Full Information at
                     http://cfp.english.upenn.edu
         or write Jennifer Higginbotham: higginbj_at_english.upenn.edu
         ==========================================================
Received on Sun Apr 24 2005 - 11:03:21 EDT