Call for Papers II -- Queer and Trans of Color Critique: Colonial Legacies, Decolonial Futures

Women, Gender, and Families of Color invites contributions for a forthcoming special issue, tentatively titled “Queer and Trans of Color Critique: Colonial Legacies, Decolonial Futures.” What do we unearth when we center queer and trans people of color’s lives, knowledge, and struggle as the analytic and political ground for understanding gender and sexuality? Marquis Bey says, “A secret of cisgender is that it is not only about gender. Gender is always a racial arrangement” (Bey 22). Queer of Color Critique (QOCC) and Trans of Color Critique (TOCC) have demonstrated how colonial and settler-colonial regimes have employed Eurocentric norms of race, body, gender, and sexuality to produce and enforce notions of normativity as mechanisms of power, discipline, regulation, and exclusion. Engaging in decolonial methodologies, QOCC and TOCC interrogate how the colonial legacy, colonial histories, and power relations remain embedded in the formation of bodies, identities, and subjectivities. In this special issue, we invite submissions that offer a conceptual bridge between bodily creation, gender deviance, and race-making, examining how normativity is enforced and contested on and through bodies. Challenging Eurocentric norms of racialized, gendered, and sexualized identities, embodiments, and practices, this issue seeks to advance the existing scholarship of QOCC and TOCC, emphasizing how normative ideas about bodies and identities are colonial projects—producing and policing boundaries of the human, the deviant, and the abject. Rooted in the legacies of women of color feminism, Black feminist thought, and intersectionality, we are looking forward to submissions that explore how colonialism, racism, capitalism, and (cis)heteronormativity mutually constitute the lived experiences of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, Pacific Islander, and other communities of color. Submissions may engage in the following (but not limited to) topics:

• Decolonial and anti-colonial genealogies in queer and trans of color critique

 • Black feminist and women of color foundations of QOCC and TOCC

• The coloniality of gender and the production of racialized bodies

 • Trans of color epistemologies and methodologies

• The making and unmaking of race, gender, and sexuality

• Queer/trans critique of racial capitalism

• Queer and trans of color migration, borders, and displacement

• Diaspora, transnationalism, and global circulations of QOCC/TOCC

• Indigenous, Two-Spirit, and decolonial trans/queer knowledge

• Health, medicalization, and biopolitics of queer and trans of color embodiment

• The normativity of bodies and bodily autonomy

• Family, kinship, and chosen community beyond Eurocentric models

• Solidarity, survival, and resistance

• Artistic, literary, and cultural production as sites of critique

• Histories and practices of mutual aid, care, and survival

• Sex work, labor, and economic justice in queer/trans of color communities

We invite scholarly articles, theoretical essays, creative work, interviews, and reviews, as well as interdisciplinary, transnational, and community-engaged approaches.

About the journal:

Women, Gender, and Families of Color is a multidisciplinary journal that centers the study of Вlack, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian American women, genders, and families. Within this framework, the journal encourages theoretical and empirical research from the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities and from new and established scholars. It welcomes comparative and transnational research as well as analyses of domestic social, cultural, political, and economic policies and practices.