CFP: Quaring Childhood

south: a scholarly journal invites submissions for “Quaring Childhood,” a special issue guest edited by Katherine Henninger, to be published in Spring 2019. This issue brings several fields that have developed substantially in the past two decades—childhood studies, critical race studies, queer theory, and new southern studies—into dialogue.

Responding to what he sees as a willful blindness toward race, class, and ethnicity in queer theory, E. Patrick Johnson borrowed from the southern vernacular to advocate for “quare studies,” which accounts for tangible, material bodies as they are situated in local (racialized, religious, regional) epistemologies and practices of everyday life. Following Johnson, Michael Bibler suggests that any discursive analysis of southern queerness must go beyond gender and sexuality to include “a [quare] recognition of how race, ethnicity, class, and locality shape the materiality of relations and identities” between region and nation, within the South, and for readers (Keywords for Southern Studies 211).

“Quaring Childhood” will, broadly speaking, place the precepts of quare in conversation with theories and representations of southern childhood as a way to explore the multivalent association of the South with queerness; the materialities of that association as embodied in representations of raced and sexed child experience; the multiple forms in which such experiences are represented in southern literary, visual, or aural culture; and the implications for queer theory, childhood studies, and/or southern studies.

Scholarly, creative, and inventive essays are welcome. Essays that work within and transgress disciplinary, historical, or geographical boundaries are welcome. We encourage work that engages entanglement, immigration, and diaspora. We also welcome abstracts that do not necessarily engage Johnson but traffic in themes of quare childhood more broadly, perhaps engaging with (but not limited to) issues of national or regional formation; narratology or form (music, photography, graphic, digital, literary); temporality (history, apocalypse, Afrofuturism); or genre (science fiction, southern gothic, neo/slave narratives, advice manuals, graphic novels, humor, children’s or young adult literature).

Please submit completed essays (7,500 words maximum including notes and works cited) by November 1st, 2018 to our online submissions manager.  See our guidelines for submissions for our editorial preferences.