Special Issue of West Coast Line:
Representations of Murdered and Missing Women.

This special issue of West Coast Line, to be published in 2007, will
gather together work related to representations of murdered and missing
women. While the focus of the issue is on representations of murdered
and missing women of Vancouver and British Columbia, WCL also invites
works which have a national or international context. (If you have
questions, please query the guest editors for a response specific to
what you propose). For more details, see below.

Submissions sought:
Though the issue will be composed mostly of essays and non-fiction, work
in all genres is invited, including fiction, poetry, drama, art and
photos (B&W reproductions), interviews (please query first), cross-genre
works, and artist statements focused on relevant work. This issue will
be of interest to academics, teachers, activists, artists, and the
broader community, and work is sought from each of these groups.

Submissions by:
30 October 2006.

Please send copies of your work (no originals), to
Amber Dean & Anne Stone c/o
West Coast Line: Special Issue
2027 East Academic Annex
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6

No email submissions, please.

Please include full contact information and send a self-addressed
stamped envelope if you'd like your work returned.

Submission details:
Margin-to-margin works (i.e. prose, up to about 3000 words)
Poems (up to about 5 pages).
Photography, artworks, etc. (up to five or so B&W pieces. Copies only,
please. Please query before sending electronic copies to
<westline_at_telus.net> ).
Contributors will be paid regular WCL rates. See <www.westcoastline.ca>
for details.

Some background:
Representations of murdered and missing women have become increasingly
common in Canadian film, art, plays, drama, fiction, poetry and the
media. Images and narratives involving the dead and disappeared, as they
move from a private to the public sphere, are inflected by larger
cultural processes.

When a work is envisioned (in part or whole) as a public act of
remembrance, whether in a civic setting or artist-run gallery, as part
of a memorial march or on the page, it likely involves a series of
negotiations. For this reason, WCL is gathering essays on what it means
to produce (and to respond to) works that represent (or otherwise
indicate) murdered and missing women. What ethical issues are
involved in creating or critically engaging with a memorial, for
instance? How is public memory related to a work of art or a text? What
tensions exist between humanization and aestheticization, representation
and exploitation? What other issues arise when that which is private is
made public? When individual identities enter a larger discourse through
trauma? What ethical questions arise around representations and
critiques that take place in the immediate aftermath of such a
significant trauma and loss? What tactics are taken in response to
images/identities that are 'fixed' by the mainstream media? What
potential readings (misreadings) exist for a photo (or the revisioning
of such photos; for example, the sketches and paintings done by various
artists with the explicit purpose of presenting softer, more "humanized"
versions of subjects)? Etc.

Representations and narratives of murdered and missing women are
unquestionably political. How are broader social issues, such as race
and gender and poverty and class, implicated in depictions of missing
and murdered women? How are missing and murdered women represented in
law, policy, activism? How are representations of missing women
organized verbally? Visually? Which urban spaces do such images exist in
or on? To what uses are the images put? What tropes 'haunt' these uses?
Are there historical precursors? Etc.

This issue of WCL is open to work from various disciplinary backgrounds,
as well as interdisciplinary work. For instance, what might an
anthropological, a linguistic, or an art history approach to the
questions at hand involve? An approach that combines or moves across and
through these disciplinary fields, or others? Most of all, this issue of
WCL is open to thoughtful, engaged responses.

If you have questions, please contact the guest editors at
<westline_at_telus.net>.

About the guest editors:
Amber Dean is currently working on her PhD in English at the University
of Alberta, although she continues to be most at home in Vancouver where
she still teaches women's studies courses at Capilano College in the
summertime. Her work has been published in Canadian Woman Studies,
Fireweed, & Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies, among others,
and she was guest editor of a special edition of Kinesis on women &
Canadian prisons. Part of her dissertation work considers
representations of murdered and missing women.

Anne Stone's first novel, jacks: a gothic gospel (DC 1998), is
experimental, conveying aspects of the story through the book's design.
The second, Hush (Insomniac, 1999), explores violence, complicity and
sites of resistance. A third novel, in the works, is about Streetsville
girls, about sisters, one of whom is gone. She currently teaches two
courses at Capilano College which look at representations of murdered
and missing women and children in contemporary texts, films, and photos,
and the uses to which those representations are put.

Amber Dean
Instructor, Women's Studies
Social Sciences Division
Capilano College
Office: Fir 437
Phone: 604-986-1911 local 2476
Mail: 2055 Purcell Way
North Vancouver, B.C.
Canada V7J 3H5

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Received on Fri Apr 21 2006 - 11:07:32 EDT