Abstract Submission Deadline: 10/15/21

Chapter length submission: 1/15/22

Amherst College Press Deadline (book length manuscript): April 15, 2022

Please note the final word count for the submitted chapter length manuscript must be 6000-7000 and

Scholars should use the Chicago Manual Style citation formatting guidelines. Brief bios, CVs, abstracts and/or completed works should be submitted to queerviolencetraumaLAC@gmail.com.

CFP

Exploring the impact of queer violence + trauma in Latinx America and the Caribbean

Despite differing social practices and ideologies, several countries have ratified anti-queer and anti-hate crime legislations, however, the violent and often traumatic objectification and subjectification of queer bodies in Latinx America and the Caribbean is pervasive. This violence is usually buttressed by the absence of civil rights and hate crime laws, or the presence of laws rooted in religious ideologies and conservative social practices that surveil, criminalize, and delegitimize queer individuals and queer sexual practices. Although the laws are not inherently violent, the interpretation of them by state actors and anti-LGBTQIA+ social norms make them violent. Specifically interrogating the socio-politics of Latinx America and the Caribbean, this project will interpret the ambivalence of anti-queer laws, mediatic representations, symbolic borders, rhetorical and physical violence, and the resulting trauma on queer communities. The project seeks to underscore the perpetual concomitant violence and trauma that confers upon queer individuals the status of “herida abierta” where healing becomes impossible. Queer existence then becomes an open wound, the place where two worlds (queer and heteronormative) grate against each other and bleed “and before a scab forms it hemorrhages again” (Anzaldua 3). 

Queering Fanon’s contributions to Critical Race Theory, this volume also contends that state and societal sanctioned anti-queer “ontology does not allow us to understand the being of the [queer person] since it ignores the lived experience. For not only must the [queer person] be [queer]; he[she/they] must be [queer] in relation to [the state/heteronormativity]. Some people will argue that the situation has a double meaning. Not at all. The [queer person] has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the [compulsive heteronormative state/society]” (Black Skin, White Masks 90). Drawing from the Hegelian dialectic and Fanon’s exploration of becoming/seeing oneself through the other, and the ways [heteronormativity] marks and creates the mythologized, subhuman [queer], the volume intends to explore the ways the queer person becomes/is a mis-interpellated subject-object, experiences violent disarticulation (physical, psychological, and emotional), and is traumatically ascribed a version of self that is rooted in a heteronormative epistemological construction that involves the cataloging of their alterity. Two patterns we have identified that link animus associated with inhabiting a queer body, the objectification of queerness, being in collusion with animality, and what it means to live and have agency within a queer body are “overkill” and sub-humanization. We are hopeful to read about other patterns scholars around the world have identified to include in this anthology.

Keywords:

Activism, Protest

Art, Performance

Biopower/Biopolitics

Border[land] Theory

Queer Body Criminalization 

Conversion therapies and practices

Critical Race Theory

Decolonial/Postcolonial Theory and praxis

Disidentifications

Economics & Progressive Ideology

Equity and Social Justice  

Gender, Sexuality and Citizenship

Government and legislation

Health practices and accessibility 

Heteronationalism(s)/Homonationalism(s)

Indigeneity, Mestizaje Queer Politics/Identities/Violence

Intersectionality and Interdisciplinarity 

Jurisprudence/Laws

LGBTQIA+

Literary, Cultural, and Visual Analyses

Mediatic Representations and State Approved Violence

Necropower/Necropolitics

Passing

Poetics/Narrative/Rhetorical Violence

Pornotroping 

Poverty

Queer Youth

Sex Trafficking

Sex work/Sex Tourism 

Shelters (real or perceived notions of access and safety)

Surveillance and Policing 

Trans Nationalism(s), Identities and Politics

Zurda and Queerness