Call for Papers: WSQ (Women's Studies Quarterly) Special Issue on Market

Guest Editors: Mara Einstein and Joe Rollins

Market is both a noun and a verb, a place where we shop and the act of selling. Market can be Wall Street or Main Street, psychological and physiological, traditional, viral or stealth. In the current period of global economic upheaval scholars from all disciplines need to interrogate the changing meanings, moods, and implications of the market. In this issue of WSQ we seek to consider consumption and markets anew, from feminist, queer, cultural, and critical perspectives. This issue will explore urgent questions related to markets. These include, but are not limited to: How might we get beyond the entrenched binaries of male/female, public/private, citizen/immigrant, producer/consumer that are central to so much thinking about markets? What does it mean to go shopping in the name of charitable giving or to purchase "green" products? How can commodities that are "locally grown" survive in the face of globalization? How does globalization compare to colonial trade? How are these changes affecting the ways we understand images, brands, icons, labels, and the meanings these transmit? How did modern consumer behavior and iconography develop? How have literary texts shaped or challenged our sense of the market? When did the commodity first appear? Is the depression getting you down?

This special issue invites submissions exploring the market and its many instantiations from a variety of perspectives including theory, empirical research, literary and cultural studies, as well as creative prose, poetry, artwork, memoir and biography. Suggested topics may include but are not limited to the following:

• The marketing of identities: sexual, gender, racial, ethnic, political, religious.

• Markets and bodies: the commodification of health and wellness, the roles of markets in conceptions of pathology, in pharmaceuticals and procedures, in beauty regimens, obesity and diet, and in ability, youth and aging. The commodification of body parts and abilities, transnational organ and surrogacy markets, patents and trade of biological materials.

• Sex and Markets: sex work, trafficking.

• Space and place: boundaries of local, rural, and urban, space, nations and border crossing, globalization.

• History: origins of modern consumerism, histories of advertising, development of specific consumer goods, imperialism and trade, the slave trade.

• Texts: marketing of authors, literary depictions of shopping, publishing conditions, goblin markets.

• Production: mass producers and industrialism, craft, locally grown and homespun goods.

• Counter-Markets: Freeganism, underground economies, bartering.

• Transnational Labor: migrant labor, trafficking, contemporary slavery.

• Families and lifecycle: fertility, motherhood, childhood, fathers, care, birth, death.

• Information technologies: social networking, technologies of taste, craigslist, google flu, online sales.

• The marketplace of ideas: facts, statistics, economics, intellectual property, fashion, education, knowledge, Wikipedia.

• Class: wealth, poverty, the middle class, and charity, luxury, and sustenance.

• Popular culture: marketing the self, iconography and visual culture, celebrity, advertising, synergy, consumer confidence.

• Stuff: acquisition, clutter, waste, thing theory, disposal, recycling, environmentalism.

• Vanishing markets: natural space, silence, crisis, risk.

If submitting academic work, please send articles by October 2, 2009 to the guest editors Mara Einstein and Joe Rollins at: WSQMarketIssue@gmail.com. They should be no longer than 22 pages.

Poetry submissions should be sent to WSQ's poetry editor Kathleen Ossip, at ossipk@aol.com by October 2, 2009. 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@gmail.com by October 2, 2009. 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.

Art submissions should be sent to WSQMarketIssue@gmail.com by October 2, 2009. After art is reviewed and accepted, accepted art must be sent to the journal's managing editor on a CD that includes all artwork of 300 DPI or greater, saved as 4.25 inches wide or larger. These files should be saved as individual JPEGS or TIFFS.