In an essay for the New Yorker, author Nell Stevens writes that, growing up as a reader of ghost stories, the “spectral presences, by being seen and not seen, by exerting energy where none was anticipated, spoke to the queerness I felt within me and didn’t understand. At that time in my life, I experienced my queerness as an unknowable force” (2022). With the advent of media like the YouTube series Queer Ghost Hunters (2016), Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Bly Manor (Netflix 2020), and Kristen Stewart’s long-awaited queer ghost hunting show Living for the Dead (Hulu 2023), queer ghosts have begun to make themselves visible in the broader landscape of paranormal media. But scholarship has yet to fully recognize the presence of queer ghosts in both real and mediated life. Our edited collection seeks to bring together scholars interested in queer ghosts and ghostlore for, we believe, the first full-length scholarly work dedicated to queer ghosts in folk and popular culture. We welcome personal, ethnographic, and scholarly essays that explore the intersections of ghostlore and queerness in folklore, literature, television, film, or other media, particularly those that emphasize a folkloristic approach.

Whether they appear as a vague haunting presence or as a powerful entity with the ability to manifest at will, ghosts and their stories permeate folk and pop culture, and not merely as a complement or supplement to the trauma of the mortals who interact with them. As Avery Gordon points out, “The ghost … is not the invisible or some ineffable excess. The whole essence, if you can use that word, of a ghost is that it has a real presence and demands its due, your attention.” Ghosts are often denied that agency in scholarship, which tends to figure ghosts as abstract or metaphorical rather than as autonomous beings, an erasure of personhood that suggests the richness of ghostlore as a site, as Stevens suggests, of queer folk production. As such, the editors of this collection prefer to think of a ghost as a corporeal or incorporeal return of a once-living now-deceased person, rather than as a methodology. And it’s not only queer ghosts who appear in our spectral landscape, as there are queer ghost hunters, ghost story readers, ghost tour guides, and ghost tour takers. We are interested in all of them, and welcome essays about a wide array of places and media where spectral queerness, as Gordon might say, “begins its presencing.” 

Some topics to consider include but are not limited to:  

• Legends and memorates of queer ghosts and how they matter to communities, individuals, etc.

• Queer presences in archetypal haunted locations (e.g. asylums)

• Representations of queer ghosts in literature, film, or television

• Queer people involved in well-known hauntings and ghost investigations

• Applications of queer theory to ghost narratives, especially essays that integrate queer theory and folkloristics

• Queer investigators, mediums, authors, etc. and their impact on media, legends, and other folklore

• Ghost legends and tourism occuring in and impacting queer neighborhoods, businesses, and other spaces

• Ethics of ghost and haunting investigations involving queer people and marginalized communities

• Impacts of religion on investigations of queer ghosts and hauntings

• Explorations of gender expressions and creation with and within ghostlore and legends

• Trans and nonbinary analysis of ghost legends, memorates, and hauntings 

• Influence of ghosts and hauntings in queer camp and drag

Please submit 300 word abstracts by Feb. 29, 2024 to aqueerpresence2024@gmail.com. Full 5000-7000 word manuscripts of accepted submissions will be due August 2, 2024.