Anticipated Publication: Volume 5, November 2025

Guest Editors: CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, Christopher J. Olson, and Hannah Steele

Purpose: Articles that explore the intersection of queer studies and professional wrestling studies to address a scholarship gap on the application of queer theory to explore professional wrestling individuals, texts, practices, and fandoms.

Submissions: Seeking empirical articles aligned with the special issue’s purpose that may include, but is not limited to, the following topics:

This panel includes various African American writers who used literature, art, history, or social scientific writings to oppose faulty presentations of an inferior tertium quid, i.e., subhuman capability. This panel welcomes review of writers and artists alike who endeavored through artistic, literary, historical, musical, filmic, or other means to contend with pseudo social scientific Untermensch designation. Writings and other media at various times and through varying genres and artistic forms, fashioned to make a case for full cultural and intellect parity.

Conference: International Congress of Medieval Studies, May 8-10 2025. Kalamazoo, Michigan.

The last twenty years have marked a wave of renewed interest in social reproduction theory, from the republication of work associated with the 1970s Wages for Housework campaign from theorists like Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, and Silvia Federici, to new works by Federici and a host of new thinkers focused on questions of social reproduction including Kathi Weeks, Nancy Fraser, Sophie Lewis, M.E. O’Brien, and Premilla Nadasen. Lewis, O'Brien, and Weeks have helped return attention to Marx and Engels's call for "the abolition of the family," and elaborated the history and scope of this demand for social revolution.

We are constantly engaged in processes of reading. We read literary texts, historical sources, films and other media, political moods and affects, and shifting social formations. Amongst the plethora of reading strategies available to us, close reading is perhaps the most widely known and most accepted one in literary studies (cf. I.A. Richards and William Empson). Other approaches to texts include ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative reading’ (Sedgwick 1997), ‘distant reading’ (Moretti 2000), ‘wide reading’ (Hallet 2010), and ‘surface reading’ (Best and Marcus 2009), to name just a few. More recent research has examined intermedial reading practices (Rippl 2015), the reading of affects (Brinkema 2014), and non/institutional readers (Emre 2017). 

From the popularity of superhero comics to cult movements around religious leaders, from venerating political figures to idolizing pop-culture celebrities, images and constructions of ‘heroes’ play a significant role in US culture. Simultaneously, there are people and actions outside of the limelight that have been revered as heroic, for example the voluntary work of nurses in homeless shelters and hospitals. While often tied to individuals, heroism occurs not just in these personified forms but can be attached to larger movements, events, or groups in more abstract ways as well. Both the figure of the hero and heroization more generally have equally frequently been weaponized throughout US history or used as a tool for political manipulation.