Please share and consider submitting to the Call for Papers below - we look forward to receiving girlhood studies contributions related to the Call for Paper's inquiries.  ---

PRIORITY DEADLINE: SEPTEMBER 15, 2019

Submissions may be in English, Portuguese, and/or Spanish. We will consider multilingual essays and may accept essays in other languages.  Please consult the guest editors before submitting in a language other than English, Portuguese, or Spanish.

Scholarly articles and inquiries should be sent to guest issue editorsTanya Saunders, Luciane Ramos-Silva, and Sarah Soanirina Ohmer at WSQsolidao@gmail.com. We will give priority consideration to submissions received by September 15, 2019.Submissions should not exceed 6,360 words (including abstract, keywords, unembedded notes, captions, and works cited) and should complywith the Feminist Press’s formatting guidelines (www.feministpress.org/submission-guidelines).

Please send complete articles, not abstracts. We prefer Microsoft Word file formats. Please provide all contact information in the body of the e-mail. We do not accept work that has been previously published or under review at another journal.

We invite contributions that #CiteBlackWomen outside of the United States on one or more topics (this list is not exhaustive):

• Pedagogies of decentering whiteness and heteronormativity

• Affect and racialized subject formation (e.g., Black queer affect)

• Crip-of-color critique in relation to solidão

• Black transfeminisms

• Sapatões, Tortilleras, Machonas, Marimachas, Areperas, and other sexual dissidents

• Genealogies of women of color theory

• Affect theory and women of color

• Theory-in-translation

• Black women and Intimacy

• The internal worlds of Black women (i.e., affective, psychic, neurological, etc.)

• Loneliness as resistance and/or as pursuit of happiness (e.g., Black women’s travels)

• Hypervisibility and invisibility

• Black women and LGBTQ+ people of color in the workplace / Labor studies

• Shared solitude and transnational solidarities

• Myths and herstories of foundational Black women (Nanny, Ezili Je Wouj, Acotirene,
  Dandara . . .)

• Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa as racialized and gendered geopolitical spaces

• Intersectionality in the American hemisphere / for Americans of African and Indigenous descent

• Intersectionality in performance, literature, plastic arts, music, film and/or media arts

• Intersectional approaches to African and/or Afro-Atlantic diasporic religions

In Virou Regra? (Is This a Rule Now? [2011]) and Mulher Negra: Afetividade e Solidão (Black women: Affectivity and loneliness [2013]), Claudete Alves and Ana Cláudia Lemos Pacheco ask: “How do race, gender and other social markers impact the affective choices of Black women?” They engage loneliness or solidão at the crux of societal demands and expectations of women of color, particularly Black women, in a global context of hypercapitalism and hypersexualization, where Black and Brown women are kept out of the “affective market” and naturalized in the “sexualized market” as domestic workers, eroticized, enslaved bodies, while white Brazilian women are assimilated into the affective culture of respectable heterosexuality. In “Enegrecendo o Feminismo / Blackening Feminism,” Sueli Carneiro (sociologist and founder of the Geledés Research Center in São Paulo) demands that the study and activism for women’s rights decenters the hegemonic idea of “mulher”/woman as white toward Africana knowledges and experiences, and the needs of Black women. Drawing from the diverse theories and experiences of Black Brazilian women, solidão describes shared isolation as an affective relational phenomenon with meanings as multiple as there are Black women. Solidão is inherent to the experiences of Black women considering the historical, social, and racial vectors that traverse our experiences. It is a concept from Black Brazilian Gender Studies that does not have a U.S. Black feminist or queer of color equivalent, nor does it translate into a single word in the English language. Yet, the feeling, and the experience, translates. As art is an expression of life, solidão resonates in creative and performing arts as well as lived experience.

How do you read/experience/address solidão? This issue invites intersectional critical theory from scholar-activists to confront systems of oppression that challenge the idea of universalism and the limited belief that humanity is white, skinny, heterosexual, able-bodied, U.S. American, middle class, Christian, and male (O que é a interseccionalidade by Carla Akotirene [2017]). How do you frame intersectional theory with Afro-Atlantic and African knowledge production outside of the United States? While recognizing the historical roots and social/racial meaning of solidão, we invite submissions that take into account how solidão is experienced differently, based on differential subjectivities and communal similarities. How can we engage solidão with Black women and LGBTQ+ communities of color as history-making and knowledge-producing protagonists?

Solidão implies an affective experience central to the formation of intersectional subjectivity. With solidão, one can reclaim José Esteban Muñoz’s theorization of the “depressive position” as central to the formation of Latinx subjectivity, specifically recalling Disidentifications and Cruising Utopia’s chapters rooted in Black queer theory and dedicated to Black queer artists (e.g., “Gesture, Ephemera, and Queer Feeling: Approaching Kevin Aviance”). We encourage authors to engage with the multilayered and multidimensional Black feminist, Black queer, queer of color theories that have yet to be translated into English, and/or that have been appropriated, misread, and/or “left alone”; to apply concepts from another language as an act of transnational solidarity with African and Afro-Atlantic women and queer of color theorizing and activism; to reengage and reclaim whitened queer of color theory written in English. We will consider work that makes productive transnational connections between Black feminist and/or queer of color affective or political theoretical productions across languages and geopolitical borders that circulated any time between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries.