Special Issue of Journal of Lesbian Studies; Guest Editor: Eithne Luibhéid

Abstract by June 30, 2018

This special issue seeks works that theorize the experiences of migrant and refugee lesbians, which offer critical insights and contributions to scholarship and activism. We use the term „lesbian“ to refer to female same-sex desire that is named and lived in multiple ways, and the term „migrant“ to refer to crossing an international border for reasons other than tourism. Despite more than two decades of queer migration scholarship, the lives of migrant and refugee lesbians still largely „resist telling“ (Crenshaw 1992).* The special issue seeks articles, academic roundtables, or other works that redress this gap. Topics may include:

• The experiences, perspectives, and contributions of migrant and refugee lesbians;
• Intersecting colonial, capitalist, racial and heteropatriarchal histories and practices that shape lesbians‘ migration possibilities, decisions, practices, and experiences;
• Migrant and refugee lesbians‘ strategies for navigating immigration, refugee, NGO, labor, welfare, community, and/or cultural regimes that construct them as illegible, criminalizable, disposable, deportable, or victims to be „saved“;
• Contestations, transformations, and life- and world-making practices, which may involve redefining selves, bodies, homes, families, communities, cultures, workplaces, attachments, orientations, and intimacies—at multiple scales from the micro to the transnational;
• Transformed and transformative methodologies, epistemologies, activisms, cultural productions, and everyday life practices that center without speaking for diverse migrant and refugee lesbians.

Articles, academic roundtables, or other works should scope 4,000-8,000 words.

Submit abstracts of 200-250 words, and a 2-3 page CV, to Eithne Luibhéid at eithne@email.arizona.edu by June 30, 2018. Acceptance notifications will be sent by July 15, 2018, and completed essays are due November 15, 2018.

*Kimberlé Crenshaw, „Whose Story Is It, Anyway? Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations of Anita Hill,“ in ed. Toni Morrison, Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), p.403.

Source: QStudy-L