[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: Queer Futures, special issue _Radical History Review_

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

From: Radical History Review <rhr at igc.org>

Radical History Review
Call for Papers

Issue #100 Queer Futures: The Homonormativity Issue

Much has changed since the RHR's special Queer issue (No. 62, Spring
1995), in which historians and their allies explored new visions of
America's gay and lesbian past. Queers now unabashedly eye straight guys
on cable television; films featuring gay characters and themes are
celebrated by mainstream audiences, breaking box office records and
winning major industry awards; gay marriage has emerged as the central
civil rights cause for powerful organizations like the Human Rights
Campaign; urban activists and civic boosters promote gay business
districts as a means for achieving visibility and equality; and
multibillion-dollar markets targeting gay and lesbian tourist dollars
are booming.

For many, such articulations of gay and lesbian identity in the public
sphere provide evidence of true social and political progress. Yet in
the past decade, some radical activists and scholars have cited such
developments not as progressive signs of liberation but as reactionary
responses linked directly to the privatizing imperatives of a powerful,
ascendant brand of neoliberal politics that coalesced in the 1990s.
Lisa Duggan, for example, has identified this trend as evidence of the
new homonormativity a politics that does not contest dominant
heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains
them. In accordance with this new homonormativity, prominent lesbian and
gay rights organizations increasingly embrace agendas that vie for
acceptance within contemporary economic and political systems, thereby
abandoning their earlier commitments to economic redistribution and
protecting sexual freedoms. This shift has made strange bedfellows out
of lesbian and gay rights organizations and social conservatives: both
endorse normative and family-oriented formations associated with
domestic partnership, adoption, and gender-normative social roles; both
tend to marginalize those who challenge serial monogamy and those
including transgender, bisexual, pansexual, and intersex constituencies
who feel oppressed by a binary gender or sex system. Moreover, because
of its economic base in the neoliberal philosophy of consumer rights
rather than that of citizen rights, the politics of homonormativity
exercises an influence beyond U.S. borders, through gay and lesbian
tourism, the global proliferation of gay and lesbian-themed U.S.
cultural productions, and economic and political interventions that
claim to make gay rights a global issue.

Many queer and/or sex-positive radicals fear such neoliberal strategies,
not only because they undermine citizens' rights but because they
threaten to erase the historic alliance between radical politics and
lesbian and gay politics, at the core of which has been a struggle for
sexual freedom. In order to counter the long-term consequences of
historical amnesia, we need new analytical frameworks for talking
about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer history that expand
and challenge current models of identity and community formation as well
as models of political and cultural resistance.

The RHR seeks submissions that explore the lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, and queer past in relation to contemporary conceptions of
homonormativity, neoliberalism, and globalization in North America and
beyond.

Some suggested topical fields include:

- Genealogies of homonormativities
- Homonormativity and racial formations
- Historical analyses of the politics of marriage and procreation in
relation to gay and lesbian political and community formations
- Historical studies of the domestic partner in relation to law,
corporate policy, privatization, and/or cultural production
- Studies of how homonormativities travel across borders, including
histories of gay and lesbian tourism and organized interventions into
issues in the name of gay rights
- Homonormativities in relation to transgender studies and politics
- Urban models of gay gentrification and contemporary configurations of
LGBT identity
- Histories of gay and lesbian markets and consumption
- Analyses of academic culture and its disciplining of glbt studies,
institutional development, and academic investments in homonormativity
- Critiques of homonormativity from queer of color and feminist of color
perspectives
- AIDS activism and the politics of sex(uality) in transnational frameworks
- Globalization, gay/lesbian identities, and cultural hegemonies
- State investments in the production and sustenance of gay and lesbian
identities
- Homonormativity, government policy, and social provision (including
the impact of homonormative politics on such issues as health insurance
provision, social services, and disaster relief - Genealogies of gay and
lesbian conservative political movements
- Sexual politics and history of the right to privacy
- Histories and critiques of identity and queer migrations
- Resistance to politics of homonormativity in U.S. and globally

The editors of this special edition invite contributions that explore
these or any themes that relate to homonormativity, queer pasts, or
queer futures.

We welcome short reports and reflections, documents, photo essays, art
and illustrations, interviews with activists or intellectuals, teaching
resources including syllabi, original documents, and exhibit and book
reviews. RHR solicits contributions from activists and academics.

Procedures for submission of proposals and articles:

By August 15, 2006, please submit a 1-2 page abstract summarizing the
article you wish to submit to rhr at igc.org.

By September 30, 2006 authors will be notified whether they should
submit their article in full.

The due date for solicited, complete articles for blind peer review is
January 1, 2007.

Articles that are selected for publication after the peer review process
will appear in volume 100 of Radical History Review, scheduled to appear
in Winter 2008.

To be considered manuscripts should be submitted electronically,
preferably in Microsoft Word or rich text format, with "Issue 100
submission" in the subject line.

Abstract Deadline: August 15, 2006
Email: rhr at igc.org


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