The International Mad Studies Journal (Web); Jersey Cosantino (Syracuse Univ.), Merrick Pilling (Toronto Metropolitan Univ.), and KJ Cerankowski (Oberlin College)

Proposals by – extended: 15.09.2025

For this special issue of the International Mad Studies Journal, we seek scholarly essays, hybrid/creative writing, and artistic work that explores madtrans studies, which we envision as the merging of mad studies and trans studies in critical, historically accountable ways. Mad studies and trans studies are relatively recent areas of study, grounded within global movements for mad and trans justice. Despite clear overlaps in the fields of mad studies and trans studies, as well as shared violence endured by mad and trans communities under a psy-complex, medical industrial complex, and the broader business of medicine and pharmaceuticals, there has been a mutual distancing from the possibilities of madtrans activism and study. Trans studies, in its push to gain legitimacy for trans knowledge, separated itself from madness and mental ‘illness’, diminishing the possibilities for madtrans solidarity. Likewise, mad studies has been limited in its exploration of transness and the ways that transphobia and sanism intersect. And yet, madtrans ways of being, theorizing, and solidarities, have existed throughout time.
This special issue uses an intersectional approach, acknowledging that some, especially multiply marginalized communities, do not want to (or cannot) reclaim madness as an identity. The psycomplex has disproportionate negative effects on those who are trans, queer, mad, disabled, racialized, criminalized, colonized, poor, denied citizenship (and thus personhood). Read more … (PDF)

We are especially seeking work that engages with:
– The intersections of race/racialization and madtransness
– Perspectives from outside North America
– Histories of femininity/transfemininity and madness
– Citizenship/migration or transnational perspectives

Source: Qstudy-l mailing list