Duke University Press Log

Call for Papers: Transgender Studies Quarterly, The Translation Issue

The Translation Issue

Guest Editors: David Gramling and Aniruddha Dutta

Special Issue on Translating Transgender

Submissions of 4000-9000 words (in any language). Due March 1, 2015 for publication in Spring 2016

Few primary and secondary texts about transgender lives and ideas have been translated from language to language in any formal way over the centuries. Meanwhile, transgender, gender variant, and gender non-confirming people have often been exiles, translators, language mediators, and multilinguals in greater numbers and intensities historically than their cisgender counterparts have. This kind of positionality among languages has become a generative, yet often precarious aspect of trans* embodiment. Nonetheless, the discourses of transgender studies (as in the neighboring fields of LGBT / queer studies) continue to be more Anglophone, more monolingual, and less translated than they historically ought to be, given how the subjects that produced those discourses have often been prototypes of transnational and translingual border-crossing. This paradox continues to constrain disciplinary and conceptual agendas around sexuality and gender a great deal more than in other fields that have enjoyed consistent state and institutional support as well as access to international distribution pathways. This is an important problem for transgender studies in the coming decades because an Anglophone disciplinary and discursive disposition will continue to lead policy-makers, public intellectuals, and academics to fall back on ethnocentric and monolingual frameworks and resources. It perpetuates a hierarchical conceptual economy, with Anglophone and West European linguacultures at the top and trans and queer vernaculars in other languages either at the bottom of the epistemic order, or sequestered into localist, ethnicized, or neo-Orientalist fetish. If not profoundly transformed, how will this discursive hierarchization impact the multi-directional traffic in trans knowledge and ideas in years ahead? This issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly calls for multilingual and translational critique. This may take the form of:

• Essays offering a metacriticism of the field, its terms, and its methodologies from a multilingual point of view
• Essays offering a theoretical problematization of national languages and transnational lingua francae as such from a trans perspective
• Essays exploring the idea of a trans* lingua franca beyond Anglocentricity
• Trans-oriented research that often gets elided precisely because of rhetorical Anglocentricity or methodological monolingualism
• Essays critiquing the relationship between travel and multilingualism in trans* contexts
• Ethnographic studies of multilingual transgender spaces and communities
• Ethnographic studies of medical, legal, penal, educational contexts in which transgender positionality or existence are negotiated translingually
• Reflections on the craft and practice of translation
• Studies on how Anglocentricity in transgender epistemology perpetuates itself—institutionally, methodologically, politically
• Essays exploring how language normativity intersects with racial, ethnic, civic, sexual, erotic, socio-economic normativity in transgender contexts
• Studies that model a “multilingual transgender studies” or a multilingual trans-futurity more broadly
• Case studies on how language frontiers shape the planetary landscape of transgender discourse
• Reflections on the process of translating texts dealing with transgender and gender variance
• Essays on what transgender methodology in translation theory or practice might look like
• Essays exploring what working interpreters and translators (literary, poetic, technical, diplomatic) may reveal about transgender epistemology
• Historical studies linking multilingual, code-switching, and translingual practice with transgender embodiment
• Historical studies linking the genealogy of monolingualism with various kinds of gender normativity

Initial submissions may be in any language and will be peer-reviewed accordingly. Duke University Press requires publication in English, and we will commission translations of accepted submissions in the latter process of review. Accepted submissions will be published in the original language on TSQ’s Web site. Please send a complete manuscript by March 1, 2015 to tsqjournal[at]gmail[dot]com along with a short abstract and brief bio including name and any institutional affiliation. The expected length for scholarly articles is 4000 to 9000 words, and 1000 to 2000 words for shorter works. All manuscripts should be prepared for anonymous peer review. For articles engaging in scholarly citation, please use the Chicago author-date citation style. Any questions should be addressed to dgl[at]email[dot]arizona[dot]edu.

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is co-edited by Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker, and published by Duke University Press, with editorial offices at the University of Arizona’s Institute for LGBT Studies. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. Every issue of TSQ is a specially themed issue that also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces. To learn more about the journal and see calls for papers for other issues, visit http://lgbt.arizona.edu/tsq-main. For information about subscriptions, visit http://www.dukeupress.edu/TSQ.

Call for Papers: The Gender and Sexuality of Militarization, War and Violence

The Journal of Middle East Women's Studies invites feminist scholars working in any discipline or interdisciplinary area in the interpretive social sciences and humanities to submit area-specific manuscripts on any topic related to the theme of "The Gender and Sexuality of Militarization, War and Violence."

Manuscripts may address any historical period related to any part of the region. Manuscripts are expected to substantiate a thesis based on original scholarship grounded in primary sources (literary, visual, archival, textual, ethnographic, artistic, legal, and so on) and to engage with relevant transnational gender and sexuality scholarship. The highest quality manuscripts will be published as articles in a JMEWS themed issue within approximately a year of submission. Submission guidelines may be found at www.jmews.org 

Manuscripts are due on or before 15 June 2015 to our online submission system here.

Questions may be directed to jmews[at]dukeupress[dot]edu.

It's Hello Kitty Month!

2014 is a big year for cultural icon Hello Kitty. She turns forty! Her creators, the Sanrio Corporation, are celebrating with a convention, HelloKittyCon, October 30-November 2; a Hello Kitty Reading Day on October 25; and with a special exibhit at Los Angeles's Japanese American Museum, "Hello! Exploring the Supercute World of Hello Kitty," which opens tomorrow, October 11.

The exhibition is co-curated by Christine R. Yano, Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Hawai`i, Manoa, and author of Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty's Trek across the Pacific. The exhibition examines the colorful history of Hello Kitty and her influence on popular culture. Hello! includes an extensive product survey, with rare and unique items from the Sanrio archives, alongside a selection of innovative contemporary artworks inspired by Hello Kitty and her world. On December 6, Yano will discuss her book at the museum. 

Yano recently made news when she revealed in a preview of the exhibition that Hello Kitty is not a cat. "Hello Kitty is not a cat," Yano told the Los Angeles Times. "She's a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She's never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it's called Charmmy Kitty." 

Here's a short excerpt from the conclusion of Pink Globalization, in which Yano explains Hello Kitty's staying power and importance. Read the entire introduction here. Happy Anniversary, Hello Kitty!

Yet she is always Kitty, even as her guises and appropriations slip and slide the semantic terrain. Indeed, the hypermeanings of Hello Kitty — that is, Hello Kitty as the uber-cute, the uber-feminine, and, for some, the uber-Japan — are part of her fetishization. She exists in her very excess, playing it multiply, exoterically. Throughout this tumble, she still manages to shock through the strength of her iconicity. The only way in which consumers might be continually shocked by a Hello Kitty vibrator or gun or tattoo is when these items overturn the image of the mouthless cat: the items undermine our expectations set in a mode of overdetermined market meanings. Each shock reconditions us to a new equilibrium of expectations, a newly calibrated zone of meaning. This gives new meaning to the name of several Sanrio stores in the United States, "Sanrio Surprise." Such constant newness and shock cause one female punk admirer to declare, "Hello Kitty is rock ’n’ roll!" By that, she points to the edginess that rock occupied in its infancy, but her statement may have been more prescient than she realized.

Indeed, as Hello Kitty wears hats both corporate and individual with equal panache, Sanrio’s cat shares the stage with many pop culture expressions who have moved from the margins to the center. Hello Kitty and the pink globalization she leads may be rock and roll to some, but she is inevitably, unabashedly, irreverently, celebratory Japanese Pop. Pure product, her logo appears seemingly everywhere. Look through the Hello Kitty lens — literally and figuratively — and every point of light transforms into Kitty. This is the wow factor, achieved simply as a low-tech wink that is both artful and artless. Moreover, as pop, she provides the ultimate shifting commercial wink upon ourselves. That wink of Japan’s mouthless cat provides important lessons on the politics, pleasures, and aesthetics of foreign-as-familiar commodity play in this age of global desirings.

Excerpt Copyright Duke University Press, 2013.

Call for Papers: French Historical Studies issue on Archives

The editors of French Historical Studies seek articles for a special issue on the theme of archives and archival practice in French history to appear in the spring 2017. Recent transnational scholarship on archives has alerted us to the ways in which archives are not neutral sites but ones where knowledge is constructed and negotiated. Discussions about whether or not cultural history has lured historians away from the archives have missed an underlying reality: historians of France and the French empire now use a wider range of public and private holdings beyond national, departmental, defense, and colonial archives. These archives often require different strategies for entry and use. To note only the most obvious differences: finding aids have not always been compiled by trained archivists and classificatory schemes vary considerably depending on organizations’ needs. Access to outsiders and the communication of documents may be limited or restricted. Technology is also transforming both the archive itself and access to the archive.

The editors invite articles that situate these issues in the context of French history and historiography. More than just tales from the archives, articles will reflect authors’ experiences in archives that illuminate both archival practice and ways of doing French history. Among the various types of non- traditional archives, we invite authors to consider church and missionary archives, corporate archives, associations’ archives, mayors’ offices and communal records, hospital archives and medical records, private papers, and colonial archives outside Aix. We also welcome articles on non-traditional ways of using traditional archives, on the impact of digitization and other technologies on archival practice, and on the encounter between historians and archivists.

Queries about submission and other matters regarding this special issue should be addressed to the guest editors, Sarah Curtis (scurtis[at]sfsu[dot]edu) and Stephen Harp (sharp[at]uakron[dot]edu).

To submit an article, please visit www.editorialmanager.com/fhs. After registering, follow the submission instructions under “Instructions for Authors” on the website. Articles may be either in English or in French but must conform to French Historical Studies style (for details, see www.dukepress.edu/fhs) and must be accompanied by titles and 150-word abstracts in both languages. Manuscripts should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words excluding notes and no longer than 10,000 words including notes. For the inclusion of illustrations, written permission must be obtained from the relevant persons or institutions for both print and online publication. The deadline for submissions is July 15, 2015.

Tikkun Wins 2014 Magazine of the Year Award

Tikkun Managing Editor Alana Price accepts the RNA 2014 "Magazine of the Year: Overall Excellence in Religion Coverage" award. Credit: Dawn Cherie Araujo.

Congratulations to Tikkun, winner of the prestigious 2014 "Magazine of the Year: Overall Excellence in Religion Coverage" award from the Religion Newswriters Association! The Religion Newswriters Association's awards recognize journalism excellence by measuring a magazine's grasp on a diversity of religion issues.

Tikkun, published quarterly, offers analysis and commentary that strive to bridge the cultural divide between religious and secular progressives. By bringing together voices from many disparate religious and secular humanist communities to talk about social transformation, political change, and the evolution of our religious traditions, Tikkun creates space for the emergence of a religious Left to respond to the influence of the religious Right and the distortions of global capitalism, while simultaneously critiquing reductionist views that sometimes prevail in liberal and progressive circles.

The most recent issue of Tikkun is available online here. To subscribe to Tikkun, visit www.tikkun.org.

To learn more about the award, please visit www.tikkun.org/rna.

 

Call for Papers: Archives and Archiving, a special issue of TSQ

This issue of TSQ will investigate practical and theoretical dimensions of archiving transgender phenomena and will ask what constitutes “trans* archives” or “trans* archival practices.”

While transgender-related experiences have long been captured by archives to some extent, the last few decades have witnessed an increased commitment to collecting trans* materials. Consequently, sizable trans* collections can now be found in a range of institutional contexts including grassroots archives, nonprofit organizations, and university-based collections.

Given this trend, myriad practical considerations that trans* materials present for archiving warrant further attention. What should or should not be included in trans* archives? What are the best practices for acquiring, processing, preserving, and making transgender materials accessible? Given practical limitations of space and money, how do we decide what to prioritize? And who decides? What are the implications for history when archivists make such decisions? How should archives negotiate ethical concerns specific to trans* archives? What relationship—if any—do trans* materials have to broader LGBTQ collections? What cataloguing tools are available and how do they obscure, distort, or make meaning of the lived experiences of trans* people? What are the benefits and limitations of using “transgender” or “trans*” as umbrella terms in an archival context? How are archivists and archival practices changed by the challenges of dealing with trans* materials? What role can digital technologies play in collecting and accessing trans* materials, particularly born-digital materials?

These practical considerations would be incomplete without a closely related theoretical exploration of trans* archiving. How, for example, are bodies representable (or unrepresentable) through archival documents? How can embodiment itself be considered an archive of memory and feeling, a sedimentation of social practices, a living medium for the transmission of cultural forms? What power do archives have in shaping popular understandings of transgender phenomena? How are researchers affected by their encounters with archival materials? How do archives steer researchers in particular ways with metadata, organizational systems, and finding aids? Can archives help construct community and personal identity? Does digitization inherently change trans* historical artifacts?

We welcome submissions of full-length academic articles on a wide range of topics related to trans* archives and archiving. Such topics might include:

• practical and philosophical considerations for developing transgender collections independently or within broader archives
• how transgender archival materials intersect with and depart from LGBQ archival materials
• critical reflections on working in trans* archives and/or with trans* archival materials
• sex, desire, and pornographic collections
• considerations of the body within and as represented by archives
• understandings of embodiment itself as an archive of affects, memory, practices, and social forms
• capturing lived experiences with archival artifacts and ephemera
• recontextualizing historical materials within the context of the archive
• affective encounters
• ethics of historical representation
• archival temporality and considerations of time and timeliness
• the role of archivists
• institutionality of government, state, academic, non-profit, and grassroots collections
• processing and interpreting trans*-related materials
• hidden collections
• archival language practices, cataloguing, and classification
• digital technologies within archives, digital archiving, and archiving born-digital materials
• intersectional identities
• access and accessibility
• archival activism

We will also consider for publication shorter essays, opinion pieces, first-person accounts, practical advice, how-to guides, or interesting archival documents. We encourage contributions from a wide range of authors including academics, independent researchers, archivists, and activists.

Please send a complete manuscript by October 15, 2014 to tsqjournal[at]gmail[dot]com along with a brief bio including name and any institutional affiliation. The expected length for scholarly articles is 5,000 to 7,000 words, and 1,000 to 2,000 words for shorter works. All manuscripts should be prepared for anonymous peer review. For articles engaging in scholarly citation, please use the Chicago author-date citation style. Any questions should be addressed by e-mail to both guest editors for the issue: Aaron Devor (ahdevor[at]uvic[dot]ca) and K.J. Rawson (kjrawson[at]holycross[dot]edu). We plan to respond to submissions by early January 2015. Final revisions will be due by March 1, 2015.

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is co-edited by Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker, and published by Duke University Press, with editorial offices at the University of Arizona’s Institute for LGBT Studies. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. Every issue of TSQ is a specially themed issue that also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces.

To learn more about the journal and see calls for papers for other issues, click here. For information about subscriptions, click here.

Considering Theory

Today's guest post is by Jason Potts and Daniel Stout, editors of Theory Aside. Jason Potts is Assistant Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and Daniel Stout is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. Here, they discuss the recent launch of The CI Review, and the history—and future—of theory.

 

“Sometimes there is an idea whose time has come, and come again,” writes W.J.T. Mitchell in his editorial note accompanying the June 2014 launch of The CI Review, the new online-only forum from Critical Inquiry. We couldn’t agree more--and, as the editors of Theory Aside, we are happy to see Critical Inquiry putting its considerable weight behind a project that sounds a lot like ours. The goal, in Theory Aside, is to think about some of the thinkers and lines of inquiry that got lost during the canonization of critical theory. In particular, we were concerned that the very dynamics that had made the age of Theory so exciting were also contributing to the speediness of its much-discussed death. Once it began to understand itself as the purveyor of radical newness and to promise the wholesale repeal of outdated methodologies, theory began to treat ideas as especially perishable things, as if they arrived with best-before dates after which they needed to be discarded and replaced. Radical innovation, or nothing: Theory, we argued, both rose (fast) and fell (steeply) because it made “the paradigm shift” the model of intellectual progress.

How encouraging, then, to have The CI Review, a venue in which thoughts whose time has come again might be revisited. And encouraging, too, to see things like the new volume from the University Press of Kentucky, Radical Future Pasts: Untimely Political Theory, a collection devoted to “reinterpreting canonical and current texts [in order] to demonstrate fresh interpretations and narratives.” What should be saluted about efforts like these is their acknowledgement of the need for sustained self-reflection about the boundaries of humanistic attention. Theoretical inquiry, Mitchell implies, has construed itself too narrowly, has been for too long “cloistered around a fixed canon of literary and artistic masterpieces.” What’s needed is the extension of our critical energies outward into what he calls “Humanities in the expanded field.”

The encounters that might be generated by putting theoretical texts into conversations about “climate change and techno-science” will be exciting. But we also hope that The CI Review, in its desire to present work that is “conceptually ambitious” and “important, challenging, and innovative,” will manage not only to extend older ideas into new terrains but to reserve some space for considering ways we might expand the canon of theory itself. As essays from Eve Sedgwick, Anne-Lise Francois, Natalie Melas, and Elizabeth Povinelli reveal, theory might have had a different chronology; as Simon Jarvis, Pheng Cheah, Irene Tucker, Jordan Stein, and Karen Beckman demonstrate, whole approaches and methodologies have been left outside of what we commonly recognize as theory; and as William Flesch, Mark Hansen, Heather Love, and Frances Ferguson show, there is much to be learned by revisiting thinkers whose moment seems to have passed (e.g., I.A. Richards, Irving Goffman, Alfred North Whitehead) as well those many of us have yet to meet (e.g. George Ainslie, A.N. Veselovsky). As Ian Balfour argues, our prosecutions of the theoretical canon might demand that we write theory in a new way.

We have, we’re suggesting, more options than we’ve tended to acknowledge. “Sometimes there is an idea whose time has come, and come again.” But there are also theoretical ideas that never registered as important. We should give our attention to those, too.

Volcanic Eruptions and Environmental Disasters in Literature and History

Cataclysmic events, such as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which happened on this day, have fascinated people for thousands of years. Individuals have attempted to express this captivation in various ways from Pliny the Younger, who survived the Vesuvius eruption and subsequently wrote in detail about his experience, to the leaders of the French Revolution, who invoked the powerful symbolism of a natural, unstoppable force that volcanoes represent. Writing about natural disasters helps people move on, but not forget, these catastrophes. As these experiences are immortalized over time, they come to symbolize hope, survival, power and destruction. Poetics Today and French Historical Studies delve further into these instances of expression and demonstrate the link between why people write about natural disasters such as Mount Vesuvius’ eruption and how that calamity empowers and embodies events long after.

In Francoise Lavocat’s “Narratives of Catastrophe in the Early Modern Period: Awareness of Historicity and the Emergence of Interpretative Viewpoints,” he discusses the reasons and ways people write about natural disasters:

Braccini’s narrative of the Naples volcanic eruption illustrates the narrator-witness’s need to explain his personal, intellectual, and even emotional perception of a given event. The 1631 eruption of Mount Vesuvius gave rise to many narratives that emphasized the contrast between “the curiosity” of the witness-narrator and the credulity of Neapolitans nurtured by legends. This contrast was inspired by Pliny the Younger’s attitude toward the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. It is also by reference to Pliny that the taste for observation, even close to the eruption site, is asserted and staged, as can be seen in Braccini’s writing. Another priest, Angelo Eugenii da Perugia, compares his “experience” of the “natural effects” of the eruption to the “extravagant exaggerations” of his contemporaries, who interpret the phenomenon as the beginning of the Apocalypse. No one denies the existence of divine causes, but nor does this prevent the consideration of secondary causes. Braccini goes to a library in Naples and does a public reading of Pliny’s letter about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, declaring to his fellow citizens: “Here is a description,58 1550 years old, that corresponds exactly to what you have before your eyes today”. In the case of the eruption of Vesuvius, the repetition of this catastrophe and the comparison it invites between AD 79 and 1629 beg for demystification: at least, the repetition suggests that this eruption, similar to a previous one in antiquity, is not the last and so very unlikely to be the Apocalypse. Braccini’s rational point of view thus partly secularizes the interpretation. The historical dimension is fundamental to this new approach to catastrophe, expressed several times around 1630, regarding the eruption of Vesuvius and the plague in northern Italy. Most narratives include an appendix that lists previous catastrophes in chronological order,60 focusing on disasters that occurred in the recent past (especially the sixteenth century) while ignoring biblical and mythical accounts. Catastrophes are no longer prophetic of other catastrophes.

Read more from “Narratives of Catastrophe” here.

In “Mountain, Become a Volcano: The Image of the Volcano in the Rhetoric of the French Revolution,” Mary Ashburn Miller establishes a relationship between the language of natural history and the political rhetoric of the French Revolution by tracing the iconography of the volcano throughout the revolutionary period:

Le jugement dernier des rois, a play written by Sylvain Maréchal, opened to enthusiastic reviews at the Theater of the Republic in Vendémiaire of Year II. Maréchal subtitled his play ‘a prophecy in one act.’ The journalist Prudhomme also embraced the future foreseen by the playwright and hoped for by the supportive Committee of Public Safety. ‘The theatrical fiction will soon become historical fact,’ he wrote. The overthrow of Europe’s kings, their return to an ‘uncivilized’ state, and their ultimate destruction by natural forces was fiction presented to, and patronized by, a broad French public, playing in Beauvais, Compiègne, Grenoble, Le Mans, Lille, Metz, and Rouen. And the volcano, symbol of revolutionary fervor and destruction, became the ultimate demonstration of nature’s justice, annihilating the monarchs in a single, terrifying, and glorious moment described in the play’s liner notes: ‘The explosion takes place: the fire attacks the kings from all sides; they fall, consumed in the innards of the opened earth.’ The quite literal fall of the monarchs, although enabled by the French Revolution itself, was portrayed as the work of natural forces.

Read more from “Mountain, Become a Volcano” here.

American Literature Article Wins Prize

Congratulations to Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue for winning the Don D. Walker Prize sponsored by the Western Literature Association! The Don D. Walker Prize is given annually to the best essay published on western American literature during the previous calendar year.Sae-Saue's article, "Aztlán’s Asians: Forging and Forgetting Cross-Racial Relations in the Chicana/o Literary Imagination," appeared in the September 2013 issue of American Literature (85:3).  Curtis Marez's piece from American Literature (85:4) was given an honorable mention for the same award.

To read Sae-Saue's article, made freely available, click here.

Honorable Mention for American Literature Digital Open Access Piece

Congratulations to Curtis Marez, who received an honorable mention for the Don D. Walker Prize sponsored by the Western Literature Association! The prize is given annually to the best essay published on western American literature during the previous calendar year. The award committee found Marez's American Literature piece, "Cesar Chavez's Video Collection," "an exciting, innovative work of interdisciplinary scholarship that reflects the aspirations of the Walker Award in demonstrating the untapped possibilities of our still unfolding field."

The digital piece was a collaboration between the journal and Scalar, a multimedia authoring and publishing web platform developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. Read more about the piece in a previous guest blog post by American Literature managing editor Emily Dings entitled "Chavez Behind the Camera," here. “Cesar Chavez’s Video Collection” is an offshoot of Marez’s book Speculative Technologies: Migrant Workers and the Hidden History of New Media (forthcoming, Duke University Press), and is available on the Scalar platform here.

Check out the rest of the American Literature special issue, "New Media and American Literature," which includes three additional open-access digital projects, here.