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For a 2013 special issue of Thymos: Journal of Boyhood Studies (Volume 7), we invite contributions to critical theory formation relevant to, or situated at, the young masculinities/young sexualities research juncture. Regular papers (7,000-9,000 words) are preferred, review essays or other formats will be considered too.
Proposals due: December 31, 2012
Final drafts due: February 15, 2013
Publication: June/July, 2013
We are specifically interested in innovative, unorthodox, and/or cross-pollinating perspectives on gender/sex/sexuality/maturity rubrification as ongoing, but also increasingly ironic, exercise. Across social media culture, young masculinities (as young femininities) are increasingly on display. This impacts on body image, researchers find; but it also impacts on how to imagine bodiliness. Recent thematization of “sexualization” has gravitated onto girls, referring to the potentially ungenerous vista of postfeminism (analogous vistas may be emerging for men’s studies). Boys are said to present the missing link, or blind spot, in many related discussions–so how to think missing links and blind spots?
Posing the question of gender/sex rubrification reflexively may be acutely relevant to both the queer studies and childhood/boyhood studies domains. How do boys (young/developmental/maturational/formative masculinities/non-femininities) figure within these domains–how are they figured out, factored in, covered; interpreted, implicated, interpellated, interrogated; conscribed, recruited, rescued; commemorated, disremembered, emblematized? Can there be a critical trijunction (or tripoint) between “masculinity studies,” “queer studies,” and “childhood/youth studies”? What of the wider constellation of critical theory? Confronted with each other’s thematic urgencies and strategic essentialisms, say in the nexus of gender and education, which theoretical contractions, institutional territorialisms, or analytic strictures do researchers, workers, teachers, and thinkers encounter? Generally, much of the commentary on (young) genders/sexualities is Anglophone and Anglo-American in focus–can we speak of an idiomatic imperialism and if so, which (foreign) travellers might shed a light on its campaign? If mentioned domains prove open to the others’ curiosity, that is, to open-ended exchanges even where stern taboos are in place, which structures of privilege or suspicion (which politics of publication, or of teaching) obtain within them? How do these fields matter to each other? Do they indeed still matter much, as fields? Ultimately, can boyhoods be researched? Can they be over-researched? Are they understood, or rather figured forth, at the occasion of commentary? And as for boyhood/girlhood studies: have these flegling specifications of childhood studies been responsive enough to critical theory? What, specifically, can still entertain, or shock, as “queer theory”?
Topics include but are not limited to:
- Ironic/niche/peripheral/sideline/underdog masculinities (nerd, emo, “herbivore”, bromantic…)
- Post-homophobic, proto/post-gay masculinities
- Transgender childhoods
- Sexualization and boys
- Schooling/curriculum/”the boy problem” in education
- Sexual abuse/sexism/harrassment
- Sex education and young genders
Send inquiries or short proposals to [log in to unmask] , preferably before December 31 2012. Full papers are due February 15 2013. Papers will be given the benefit of a speedy but regular peer consultation round. In full papers, include a 80-120 word abstract and 4-6 keywords; we request APA (6th ed.) style in final drafts.
General info on Thymos: http://goo.gl/Vnl8I
Short url for this CfP: http://goo.gl/PCHkJ