20 May 2013 18:23
CFP: Media Spaces of Gender and Sexuality
Lindsay Palmer <lnpalmer2000 <at> YAHOO.COM>
2013-05-20 16:23:41 GMT
2013-05-20 16:23:41 GMT
Apologies for cross-posting!
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CFP: Media Spaces of Gender and Sexuality
Media
Fields Journal
University
of California, Santa Barbara
This
issue of Media Fields investigates the connections between
media, space, gender, and sexuality, seeking conversations that center on these
interrelations and negotiations. We invite papers that raise questions of how
media spaces construct gender, and how gender, in turn, constructs media
spaces; how spaces condition and are conditioned by gender performances and
sexual practices; and how gender legibility limits (or allows) access to
various media spaces.
Film and
media scholarship historically came of age through its study of the
relationship between gender, sexuality, and media. Much has been written about
the status of women as objects of the cinematic gaze, as well as about the
status of female and queer-identified subjects as media producers. Yet in more
recent times, issues of gender and sexuality have once again become
marginalized in academic discourse, revealing the need for new explorations
that coincide with the impact of the “spatial turn.” In this age of conflict,
dissent, surveillance, and migration—when the study of media is often also the
study of the precariousness and dynamism of the spatial—it is particularly
important to trace the interconnections between space, media, and gender.
We are
inspired by the work of those film and media scholars who have explored such
interconnections. Lynn Spigel’s seminal book on the gendered discourse
surrounding domestic television viewing provides us with one useful example, as
does Lucas Hilderbrand’s forthcoming work on the culture of gay bars after
Stonewall. While some scholars like Spigel and Hilderbrand have studied the
connections between gender, space, and media in their own work, fewer media
studies journals have made this topic a primary focus. As a result, we seek
scholarship that deals with space in a range of ways: essays might discuss
online spaces that allow for specific negotiations of gender or sexuality, or
with gender embodiment in physical spaces of various scales, from the very
local (the living room, for example) to the global.
Essays
might also draw upon feminist interventions into Marxist/historical materialist
theories of space, as well as engaging the intersections between gender, race,
and class. These important intersections exceed the label, “identity
politics”—a label that we feel is now often deployed in order to debunk the
continued relevance of gender and sexuality to any scholarly conversation.
While we do indeed call for political approaches to gender and space—essays
informed by the agendas of feminist and queer activism—we stress that gender
and sexuality are not merely areas of special interest, but are instead
structuring principles of discrimination that permeate our lives on a number of
registers.
Thus, our
approach is multivalent. We invite submissions that consider this complexity,
possibly addressing the following topics:
--Transnational
Queer and Feminist Media: How are flows of bodies, labor, capital, and images
gendered and sexualized?
--Queering
Questions of Scale: How does heterosexism delimit notions of nation, state, and
the transnational?
--Gendered
Spaces of Conflict and Dissent: How do media contribute to the gendering of the
different spaces of war and dissent as well as of the subjects who are
involved?
--Gender,
Sexuality, and Online Spaces: How are social media practices and spaces
gendered and sexualized?
--Queer/Feminist
Gaming: representations of gendered and sexualized spaces in mainstream video
games, gendered geographies of video game production, gendered spaces of
gaming culture
--Spaces
of Surveillance: How is surveillance fundamentally gendered, sexualized, and
spatialized? How does voyeurism continue to bolster certain experiences of
space and place?
--Gendered
Infrastructures: How are media infrastructures gendered, and why does this
matter?
--Gender,
Sexuality and Access: How do gender and its legibility (e.g., normativity)
result in certain types of access to particular spaces?
We are
looking for essays of 1500-2500 words, digital art projects, and audio or video
interviews exploring the relationship between gender, sexuality, and space. We
encourage approaches to this topic from scholars in cinema and media studies,
anthropology, architecture, art and art history, communication, ecology,
geography, literature, musicology, sociology, and other relevant fields.
Feel free
to contact issue co-editors, Hannah Goodwin and Lindsay Palmer, with proposals
and inquiries.
Email
submissions to submissions <at> mediafieldsjournal.org
by May 30th, 2013.
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