(with apologies for cross-posting)

CFP: Media Spaces of Gender and Sexuality
Media Fields Journal
University of California, Santa Barbara

This issue of Media Fields investigates the connections between media,
space, gender, and sexuality, seeking conversations that center on
these interrelations and negotiations. We invite papers that raise
questions of how media spaces construct gender, and how gender, in
turn, constructs media spaces; how spaces condition and are
conditioned by gender performances and sexual practices; and how
gender legibility limits (or allows) access to various media spaces.

Film and media scholarship historically came of age through its study
of the relationship between gender, sexuality, and media. Much has
been written about the status of women as objects of the cinematic
gaze, as well as about the status of female and queer-identified
subjects as media producers. Yet in more recent times, issues of
gender and sexuality have once again become marginalized in academic
discourse, revealing the need for new explorations that coincide with
the impact of the “spatial turn.” In this age of conflict, dissent,
surveillance, and migration—when the study of media is often also the
study of the precariousness and dynamism of the spatial—it is
particularly important to trace the interconnections between space,
media, and gender.

We are inspired by the work of those film and media scholars who have
explored such interconnections. Lynn Spigel’s seminal book on the
gendered discourse surrounding domestic television viewing provides us
with one useful example, as does Lucas Hilderbrand’s forthcoming work
on the culture of gay bars after Stonewall. While some scholars like
Spigel and Hilderbrand have studied the connections between gender,
space, and media in their own work, fewer media studies journals have
made this topic a primary focus. As a result, we seek scholarship that
deals with space in a range of ways: essays might discuss online
spaces that allow for specific negotiations of gender or sexuality, or
with gender embodiment in physical spaces of various scales, from the
very local (the living room, for example) to the global.

Essays might also draw upon feminist interventions into
Marxist/historical materialist theories of space, as well as engaging
the intersections between gender, race, and class. These important
intersections exceed the label, “identity politics”—a label that we
feel is now often deployed in order to debunk the continued relevance
of gender and sexuality to any scholarly conversation. While we do
indeed call for political approaches to gender and space—essays
informed by the agendas of feminist and queer activism—we stress that
gender and sexuality are not merely areas of special interest, but are
instead structuring principles of discrimination that permeate our
lives on a number of registers.

Thus, our approach is multivalent. We invite submissions that consider
this complexity, possibly addressing the following topics:

--Transnational Queer and Feminist Media: How are flows of bodies,
labor, capital, and images gendered and sexualized?
--Queering Questions of Scale: How does heterosexism delimit notions
of nation, state, and the transnational?
--Gendered Spaces of Conflict and Dissent: How do media contribute to
the gendering of the different spaces of war and dissent as well as of
the subjects who are involved?
--Gender, Sexuality, and Online Spaces: How are social media practices
and spaces gendered and sexualized?
--Queer/Feminist Gaming: representations of gendered and sexualized
spaces in mainstream video games, gendered geographies of video game
production,  gendered spaces of gaming culture
--Spaces of Surveillance: How is surveillance fundamentally gendered,
sexualized, and spatialized? How does voyeurism continue to bolster
certain experiences of space and place?
--Gendered Infrastructures: How are media infrastructures gendered,
and why does this matter?
--Gender, Sexuality and Access: How do gender and its legibility
(e.g., normativity) result in certain types of access to particular
spaces?

We are looking for essays of 1500-2500 words, digital art projects,
and audio or video interviews exploring the relationship between
gender, sexuality, and space. We encourage approaches to this topic
from scholars in cinema and media studies, anthropology, architecture,
art and art history, communication, ecology, geography, literature,
musicology, sociology, and other relevant fields.

Feel free to contact issue co-editors, Hannah Goodwin and Lindsay
Palmer, with proposals and inquiries.

Email submissions to [log in to unmask] by May 30th, 2013.

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