WOMEN’S STUDIES
QUARTERLY
is pleased to announce the Call for Papers for its Spring 2019 Special Issue:
ASIAN DIASPORAS
Guest Editors: Lili Shi, Kingsborough Community College-CUNY and Yadira Perez Hazel, University of Melbourne
Asian diasporas are gendering spaces and times that intertwine stories of race, transnationalism, citizenship, and postcoloniality. We contend that Asia is not only a geographic term, but also a comparative one. It is the collective sum of heterogeneous racial, regional, transhistorical and transnational politics that transcends bodies and identities of “Asia” across Global South and North as well as global mediascape. We also embrace an expansive notion of diaspora, one that is beyond the mere causal result of travel and migration that reifies the binary of home and settlement that subsequently “privileges the mobility of masculine subjects” (Campt, T. & Thomas, D. A., 2008, p.2). We propose Asian diasporas as scattered communities, identities and relationships that are conditioned by, while influencing and transforming, global struggles of nation, empire, postcoloniality, transnationality and respective hegemonies.
This special issue aims to curate essays that theorize and narrate Asian diasporas through feminist frameworks. We invite contributors to foreground gender as they engage conceptually with Asian diasporas as spaces of un-unified and uneven gendering and queering experiences, identities, histories and hegemonies, compelling individuals to endlessly translate multiple forces into daily interactions (Brah, 1996; Hall, 1996; Ang, 2001; Edwards, 2003; Grewal, 2005; Campt, 2004; Gopinath, 2005; Campt & Thomas, 2008, Atay 2015). What are the local and global gendering moments in Asian diasporic transnationalism? How do we investigate “politics of destination” (Chu, 2010) in the often-described fluid movement of Asian diasporas? What unique struggles do Asian diasporas encounter as a historically feminized group in colonialist discourse? In what light should we study Asian diasporas beyond the Global North’s imaginaries of “Asia” and its related gender identities, localities, populations, and bodies?
This call also encourages contributors to examine this issue’s boundary-marking concepts of Asian-ness, diasporic-ness, woman-ness and queerness within various grounded contexts and times. For example, how does gender intersect with the politics of belonging in racialized immigrant communities? How do we theorize intra-diasporic differences? What are the comparative or differing histories and moments that Asian diasporas encounter with those of other diasporas, other marginalized groups, against the dominant (American-centric) black-and-white racial relationships? How are Asian diasporic women and queer affected by global scripts of patriarchy, neoliberalism, transnational capitalism, and the responding logics of gender, race, labor, and family?
We especially welcome contributions that engage Asian diaspora beyond the Americas, beyond U.S. notions of race and racial experience, and diasporas across centers of Global North within Asia.
We invite essays on, yet not limited to, the following topics:
· Diasporic Asian gender identities and belonging
· Non-binary manifestations and creations of Asian diasporas
· Concepts, ideologies and practices of masculinity/femininity/gender hegemonies among Asian diasporic communities
· Queer Asian diasporas and identities
· Asian diasporas in cyberspace
· Disabilities in Asian Diasporas
· Women in faith-based diasporic Asian communities
· Asian diaspora women’s labor
· Asian diaspora and feminist autoethnographies
· Gender, nation, and class in Asian diasporic contexts
· Neoliberalism and gender in Asian diasporas
· Feminine health in Asian diasporas
· Gender and poverty in Asian diaspora
· Media consumption/representation of Asian diasporic women and queer communities
· Asian diasporic community organizing
· Asian feminist diasporic art
· Asian diasporic families (gender relations)
· Diasporic youth and parenting
· Decolonializing feminisms among Asian diasporas
- State policies, citizenships, public practices, and local activisms of Asian diasporas across gendered expressions
- Circuits of migration, detention, exile, incarceration, deportation, and enslavement
- Practices, narratives of Asian Diaspora outside and/or within “Asia”
Scholarly articles and inquiries should be sent to guest issue editors Lili Shi and Yadira Perez Hazel at AsianDiasporasWSQ@gmail.com
We do not accept work that has been previously published. Please provide all contact information in the body of the e-mail.
Poetry submissions should be sent to WSQ’s poetry editor Patricia Smith at WSQpoetry@gmail.com by March 1, 2018. Please review previous issues of WSQ to see what type of submissions we prefer before submitting poems. Please note that poetry submissions may be held for six months or longer. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable if the poetry editor is notified immediately of acceptance elsewhere. We do not accept work that has been previously published. Please paste poetry submissions into the body of the e-mail along with all contact information.
Fiction, essay, memoir, and translation submissions between 2000-2500 words should be sent to WSQ’s fiction/nonfiction editor, Rosalie Morales Kearns, at WSQCreativeProse@gmail.com by March 1, 2018. Please review previous issues of WSQ to see what type of submissions we prefer before submitting prose. Please note that prose submissions may be held for six months or longer. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable if the prose editor is notified immediately of acceptance elsewhere. We do not accept work that has been previously published. Please provide all contact information in the body of the e-mail.
ABOUT WSQ: Since 1972, WSQ has been an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of emerging perspectives on women, gender, and sexuality. Its peer-reviewed interdisciplinary thematic issues focus on such topics as Precarious Work, At Sea, Solidarity, Queer Methods, Child, Activisms, The Global and the Intimate, Trans-,The Sexual Body, and Mother, combining legal, queer, cultural, technological, and historical work to present the most exciting new scholarship, fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, book reviews, and visual arts on ideas that engage popular and academic readers alike. WSQ is edited by Jillian Báez (College of Staten Island-CUNY) and Natalie Havlin (LaGuardia Community College-CUNY) and published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Visit http://www.feministpress.org/w