Originally published in 2015 at: http://gsrc-mena.org/kohl/call-for-papers/
We are pleased to invite submissions for the third issue of Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research, slated for publication in June 2016. Young activists, independent researchers, graduate students and fresh graduates are particularly encouraged to apply. We also welcome submissions from seminal contributors in the field.
Click here to submit a manuscript through the Kohl editorial manager system.
Click here to review our submission guidelines.
“We have addressed violence and exploitation and heterosexual assumptions without first establishing the understanding that for each of us, desire is unique and necessary and simply terrifying” – Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature.
The discourse of violence has been used pervasively and indiscriminately to describe the wave of upheavals and conflicts that took over the Middle East and North Africa region. In many instances, the conversation around violence, terrorism, and extremist fundamentalism disregards normalized manifestations of violence. It also overlooks consent and simplifies the multiple layers of resistance and/or pleasure that accompany movements and practices that are stereotypically perceived as violent.
For the third issue of Kohl, we are looking for papers that problematize the concept of violence, and account for its intersection with gendered socioeconomic and institutionalized discrimination. We are also interested in understanding/historicizing pain and resistance, and liberating them from the violence paradigm, especially as they happen in non-hegemonic contexts. Often, discourses of violence mitigate issues of pleasure, self-defense, and self-care, which can also be framed as resistance beyond organized movements by occupying alternative spaces within violent environments.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- What is violence, how does it manifest itself, and who defines what is violent and what is not?
- “Self-defense:” hegemonic/structural violence passing as self-defense, non-hegemonic resistance, and feminist self-defense strategies.
- Theorizing the complexities of violence and resistance in armed and unarmed conflicts: to what extent is resistance violent, and when does violence not subscribe to traditional constructs?
- Compulsory militarization, romanticizing of the military institution, and the distinctions between armed resistance and the military.
- Organized and spontaneous movements of resistance, whether in Palestine or other regional contexts: their histories, strategies, political ideologies, and expansion.
- Resistance to structural and institutionalized violence: economic violence, colonization, settler colonialism, occupation, intellectual hegemony, etc.
- Normalized moments of violence in everyday life: road rage, masculinized fights, street harassment, self-damage, etc.
- Reclaiming sites of pleasure in environments perceived as violent: power, self-care, well-being, and the pursuit of pleasure and happiness.
- What about consent? Nuances of pleasure and consensual pain in violent contexts.
- BDSM: do violence and pleasure constitute a binary, and is pain necessarily violent?
- Feminist theorizing of gendered and sexualized violence, especially in relation to marginalized groups.
The deadline for submission is January 28, 2016.
We accept work in progress, provided full drafts are submitted. Please make sure to comply with the submission guidelines. If accepted for inclusion, please note that your paper will be translated to a second language by our team.
For further queries, please contact kohl@gsrc-mena.org
The call is available for download in PDF format.
Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research كحل: مجلة لأبحاث الجسد و الجندر is part of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center (GSRC) in cooperation with Heinrich Boell Stiftung, Middle East Office, Beirut.