Special Issue of Feminist Formations (Web); Edited by Kelly Fritsch and Anne McGuire, Toronto

Proposals due: 01.02.2017

This special issue charts the limits and possibilities of queer/crip biosocial politics by examining the ways these intersect and co-mingle with the narratives, practices, and temporalities of contagion. Feminist scholars have long theorized “queer” and “crip” as unsettling, strange, twisted, or disruptive. Moreover, feminists have demonstrated how a queer/crip refusal of closure invites a range of discursive and embodied forms of contestation and coalition, offering radical alternatives to assimilationist or reformist politics. The coming together of queer and crip is an unstable yet fruitful site of interdisciplinary and multispecies exposure and exchange. Building upon and extending these insights, this special issue will trace the multiple and unexpected ways “queer” and “crip” influence and infect one another. Drawing on the etymology of contagion as “a touching, contact” or “touching closely,” how do queer and crip come into contact? What is absorbed? What is exchanged? And, what is or might yet be produced at this site? We solicit a diverse collection of articles emanating from a range of interdisciplinary fields and areas of study, but that are also united by a shared commitment to queer and crip the discourses and practices of contagion itself. Read more … (Web)