Special Issue on Queer Texts for Youth in The Lion and the Unicorn
CFP: Special Issue on Queer Texts for Youth in The Lion and the Unicorn
This special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn invites essays focused on queer texts (capaciously imagined—literature, film, social media, print culture, television, comics, material culture, music, games) for young audiences, both recent and historical. How do readers find, encounter, and make meaning of queer texts? How is queerness discernible or imagined in texts where LGBTQ+ content is not explicitly represented? How might the textual forms available to youth, both present and historical, invite or enable queer relations? How might queer texts of the past resonate or take on new forms in the current moment? Do queer texts speak to youth beyond LGBTQ+ children and young adults? Can texts be made queer through engagement with and creation of paratexts like fan fiction and digital cultures that emerge in online communities and social media platforms? How might the queerness of a text challenge norms around age and time—can one inhabit or make peace with their own youth through an encounter with a queer text as an adult? What is the relationship between queer representations and efforts to stabilize and categorize queer ways of being? How might readers and queer characters resist, refunction, and escape these efforts at knowability?
We invite these inquiries at a moment when politicians, policy makers, school administrators, and parents are working to censor, ban, and limit the materials children can access, especially when those texts contain queer content. At the same time, we are operating in a moment when we are seeing a proliferation of children’s media that announces itself as LGBTQ+ friendly or contains explicitly queer representations. We are interested in the effects of this politicization of children’s texts happening from multiple directions—how might work to eradicate queer representation on one end of the political spectrum coalesce with efforts to mainstream (and perhaps risk sanitizing) queer representation from the other end of the political spectrum? How do these tensions impact the ways young readers can access, discern, identify with, or understand queerness? How do queer ways of being stay dynamic, responsive, and life-sustaining? How have these tensions played out in the past as well as the present? How have different generations related to and inhabited queerness differently? Examinations of queer texts for young audiences open up these questions and more, highlighting the critical importance of ethical and diverse representations of queer lives for all ages.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- how queerness in texts for young readers intersects with race, ethnicity, and/or disability
- depictions of queerness in a range of genres and textual forms
- book bans, challenges, and controversies
- how queerness in texts impact trajectories and constructions of queer childhood and youth
- digital media platforms’ relationship to constructions and circulations of queer knowledge
- queerness that emerges in paratextual material and communities (e.g., fan fiction, social media, online communities)
- the relationship of queer texts to identity formation and categories of gender and sexuality
- reading and interpreting queerness in texts that don’t announce themselves as queer
- children and youth’s relationship to drag
- the marketing of queerness in industries that produce material for children and youth
- the sanitization and evacuation of queerness in some media forms for children
Please submit 500 word proposals and a CV to Brie Owen gowen3@unl.edu and Mary Zaborskis mzz5335@psu.edu with the subject line “LU Abstract” by 15 March 2024. Decisions will be made by 15 April 2024. Essays should be approximately 8,000 words in length. Accepted articles are due by 1 July 2024. All papers will be subjected to peer review. Accepted articles will appear in The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 49, no. 2 (2025). All submissions should follow the style guidelines posted on the Lion and the Unicorn website including the MLA 9 edition guidelines.