Call for Book Chapters

Heated Rivalry: Queer Joy and Intimate Masculinity on Television

This edited book collection invites scholarly contributions on Heated Rivalry (2015-). Adapted from Rachel Reid’s romance novel, the Canadian Crave original series system became an  unexpected global success via HBO. Set in professional ice hockey, Heated Rivalry is propelled by queer characters and the sustained pleasures of their relationship. Its defining contribution is not exposure or transgression, but queer joy: intimacy, desire, humour, trust, and emotional safety enacted within demanding institutional and work settings.

At the centre of Heated Rivalry is a reframing of intimacy under pressure. The series treats queer hiding not as titillation or narrative delay, but as a survival strategy structured by professional, social, and cultural fear: fear of career damage, locker-room cultures, media scrutiny, national myths of masculinity, and the political risks attached to queer visibility in elite sport. Consent and care aren’t exceptional moments but organising principles, communicated through pacing, checking in, hesitation, and bodily responsiveness. Rather than building towards a single climactic revelation or resolution, the narrative returns across time to separation, reunion, and emotional recalibration, allowing intimacy to appear as something made and remade through endurance, negotiation, and care.

Formally and industrially, Heated Rivalry exemplifies platform-era prestige television. Its close framing, limited locations, and emphasis on interior spaces produce affective density rather than spectacle, while intimacy coordination operates as an embedded production practice shaping both ethics and aesthetics. Weekly release rhythms and bingeing, streaming circulation, and social media recap cultures turn each episode into a collective event, with fandom functioning as an infrastructure of meaning-making rather than a supplementary afterlife. The show’s global reach raises urgent questions about how nationally produced Canadian television travels, how queer romance becomes internationally legible, and how intimacy, consent and care operate as engines of popularity rather than niche moral concerns.

This edited volume seeks to position Heated Rivalry as a key text for understanding contemporary queer television, masculinity, labour, and intimacy. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions that engage the series as a cultural text, industrial product, and social phenomenon.

Suggested themes and approaches

Submissions may address (but are not limited to) the following areas:

Consent, care, and ethical intimacy

• Consent as televisual grammar: pacing, micro-gesture, hesitation, and mutual responsiveness
• Intimacy coordination as creative and industrial labour
• Ethical pleasure and viewer trust in contemporary television
• Care, repair, apology, and relational maintenance as narrative structures

Hiding, fear, and institutional power

• Hiding as risk management in professional sport
• Reputation, sponsorship, and the economics of queer visibility
• Surveillance regimes: teams, media, fans, and publics
• Closet logics without tragedy: strategy, compromise, and emotional labour
• National and geopolitical pressures shaping queer visibility

Masculinity, sport, and work

• Ice hockey as labour/the workplace: discipline, injury, precarity, and productivity
• Masculinity as affective regulation and emotional competence
• Rivalry as sanctioned intimacy and cover for attachment
• Injury, recovery, and care work within elite sport
• Work–life boundaries, burnout, and relational endurance

Form, aesthetics, and spatial storytelling

• Intimate thresholds and liminal spaces: locker rooms, corridors, hotels, kitchens
• Low-budget production craft as affective strategy
• Temporality, repetition, and non-linear serial narration
• Bilingualism, language, and intimacy
• Costume, comfort, and softness as narrative devices

Genre, adaptation, and comparison

• Queer sports romance and television melodrama
• Adaptation across romance publishing, BookTok, and streaming TV
• Comparative queer sports texts and hockey media cultures
• Reworking masculinity and intimacy in mainstream genres

Embodiment, neurodivergence, and reception

• Embodiment, touch, food, routine, and comfort
• Neurodivergent fan readings as interpretive practice
• Refusal of pathology and diagnostic storytelling
• Audience recognition, trust, and emotional credibility

Submission details

• Abstracts: 250–300 words outlining the argument, framework, and contribution
• Author bio: 100 words
• Abstract deadline: 3 August 2026
• Notification of acceptance: 3 October 2026
• Full papers due: 3 February 2027
• Word Length: 7500 words including references (Chicago Author-Date)
• Submission and enquiries: jo.coghlan@une.edu.au