English Language Notes (ELN) Call for Papers 

“Global Queer and Trans Class Relations” 
 

A special Issue of English Language Notes (ELN), Vol. 65, No. 2 (October 2027) 

Edited by Matt Brim and Emmanuel David 

Submissions due September 1, 2026 

This special issue of ELN is premised on the idea that queer and trans are inevitably intertwined with class, just as they are also inflected by race, caste, disability, and gender. The coeditors seek essays that explore the ways in which queer and trans people understand their overlapping and different positions within class relations and how they experience, manage, and resist the logics of capital (labor, productivity, accumulation, extraction, consumption, debt, etc). 

We are especially interested in essays that examine queer and trans class relations in a transnational frame. Our goal is not to collect disparate examples from different/ “other” geographic locations but rather to publish a set of articles that, together, cohere an understanding of queer and trans class analysis as a methodology for relating across and among sites of grounded, material experience. This special issue thus hopes to identify and give space to nascent conversations about emergent and potentially unorthodox queer-class frames of reference (e.g., South-South lenses; international queer studies formations). 

This special issue builds on over three decades of scholarship in queer studies that has foregrounded queer-class intersections, including milestone conferences like the 1994 CLAGS conference Homo/Economics: Market and Community in Lesbian and Gay Life and the 2026 CLAGS Queer-Class Relations Conference. The collection of essays is also indebted to work in the areas of queer Marxism (Liu 2015, 2023) and queer of color analysis, which takes up materialist critiques (with revision) and provides analytic strategies that disidentify with historical materialism (Ferguson 2003). In adjacent discussions in transgender studies, a field that is positioned structurally “against Queer Theory” in the academy (Keegan 2020), trans is often distinguished from queer on the basis of class, and there is an expanding body of work that explores the intersection of trans lives and materialist approaches, including trans-political economy (Irving & Lewis 2017) and trans Marxism (Terán and Travis 2024). Finally, queer diasporic studies and decolonial queer studies have sought to provincialize queer theory (Liu 2024) and to focus on theorizing from and across the Global South (Gomes Pereira 2019; Silva and Jacobo 2020). At this intersection, this special issue also extends trans critiques of economic imperialism (Namaste 2005) and recent work in “transnational queer materialism” (Jaleel & Savcı 2024). As we draw attention to queer and trans studies' stakes in political economy and critiques of capital, we seek essays tethered to individual and collective class histories and relations as they are lived. 

Guiding Questions 

• How does careful attention to global queer and trans experience clarify but also obfuscate class contradictions? 

• In what ways does work at this intersection contribute to the ongoing reassessment of the fields of queer and trans studies?  

• Thinking broadly about textual sources, empirical data, and interpretive methods, what concrete evidence/material experiences can be used to support work in this area? 

• How does cultural production (literature, art, performance) speak to this set of questions? 

Potential Topics 

The Global Queer and Trans Class Relations special issue editors invite contributions that explore topics on, but not limited to:   

• Transnational networks of queer and trans solidarity 

• Transmisogyny as a classed phenomenon 

• Queer Marxism 

• Geographies of queer and uneven development (Global South, postsocialist, rural) 

• Latino/a/e queer-class fiction/cultural production 

• Translating class across queer communities 

• Sex work 

• Global racial capitalism 

• Transgender and HIV healthcare as a border issue 

• “Queer” refugees and asylees 

• Labor and value 

• Class stratification in the international queer academy 

• Carceral geographies and trans/queer-class formations 

• Queer gentrification 

• Neoliberalism then and now in queer studies 

• Capitalism and queer resistance 

• Classed archives 

• Erotics of class crossover 

• Emergent forms and structures of queer-class relations 

• Queer and trans critiques of empire and economic imperialism 

Timeline 

Please submit essays of approximately 6,000-7,000 words by September 1, 2026. Submit manuscripts directly through Editorial Manager (http://www.edmgr.com/eln/). For more information about submissions, see Author Guidelines. Following external peer review, revised submissions will be due by mid-January 2027. The special issue will appear in October 2027 (Vol. 65, No. 2). 

This special issue will include an introduction by the Special Issue editors (Matt Brim, Executive Director of CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at CUNY Graduate Center and Professor of Queer Studies at the College of Staten Island, and Emmanuel David, Associate Professor of Women & Gender Studies at University of Colorado Boulder).