Call for Papers:

Race & Queer, Trans, and Reproductive Rights

“When we are talking about gender and sexual politics…I’m not convinced we need to invent any trans or gender-based rubrics to understand the space or to mobilize against it. The existing critical rubrics of race and empire and racial governance would already encompass and analyze perfectly well what is going on and also provide us with a different political grammar of political solidarity and history.”

-Jules Gill Peterson, “Critical Race Theory Today” JCRI Vol 9 No 2, 2022.

We are witnessing an intensification and broadening of assaults on peoples’ bodily dignity and autonomy. In the U.S., the overturning of Roe V. Wade in 2022 occurred in tandem with an onslaught of violence, legislation, and media attacks on gender-affirming healthcare, schooling, and recreation. Demands to remove critical race theory from curriculums in both secondary and higher education have paved the way for attacks on equity measures that are now affecting queer and trans communities. In Canada, the June attack on a gender studies class in Waterloo, “parental rights” discourses, legislation introduced in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan undermining young people’s ability to express their gender identity freely, and the anti-trans marches that occurred across the country last fall are bringing increased local urgency to the situation. 

Although these attacks might be unexpected for some, for Black, Indigenous, migrant and other racialized peoples, experiences of violence, surveillance, and criminalization are not new. Similarly, for sexual and gender minorities (trans, queer, sex working), criminalization, violence and social erasure have historically been more the rule than exception. However, the specific shape of these violences and the ways they intersect, overlap, and are expressed contemporaneously deserve special consideration. 

With this special issue, we hope to trace the ways the homophobic and transphobic attacks on queer, trans, and reproductive rights are racialized, and how the imperatives of racism, settler-colonialism, fascism, and empire might in fact dictate the shape of these attacks. We hope that better understanding these dynamics might also allow for the development of resistance strategies grounded in intersectional solidarities.

• How are attacks on trans people's lives and reproductive rights not only intersecting with racial injustice, but also derivative of colonial, racist, and imperial violence?
• How do the motives of attacks on trans and reproductive rights intersect with white supremacy and contemporary and historical fascisms? How is this expressed concretely and covertly?
• What are the experiences of BIPOC communities in access or lack of access to gender affirming or reproductive care, and what can that tell us about the relationship between race and how and why gender, sexuality, and reproduction are policed by the state?
• How have responses to crackdowns on reproductive and trans rights and autonomy reflected the racial logic of society at large? How might we imagine and create responses that better resist the imperatives of both white supremacy and gender-based oppression?
• How do racial formations intersect with citizenship in the deployment of settler logics that cut across borders? In what ways do American and Canadian settler logics converge and collude in the bid to constrain bodily autonomy of specific populations? In what ways is the state apparatus particular to the nation-state in question?
• How does right-wing religious fundamentalism interact with legislative apparatuses and governance structures in solidifying these attacks on bodily autonomy? How might BIPOC communities be situated within this nexus?
• In what ways do attacks on reproductive freedom and trans and queer lives articulate to the strategies of homonationalism and pinkwashing employed by imperialist, settler colonial, and ethno-national states since the late 20th century? How might we consider this phenomenon in relation to U.S., Canadian, German, and UK support for the ongoing genocide in Gaza, anti-Kurdish and anti-feminist repression in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Indian state’s anti-Muslim violence and occupation of Kashmir?    

Articles should be 6000-8000 words in length, and academic, creative, and activist submissions are welcome. Submissions now due April 19th. Complete submission guidelines and information about how to submit are available at https://jcri.ca/index.php/CRI/about/submissions

Please contact mnedjcri@queensu.ca with any questions.