CFP: Journal of Lesbian Studies

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS - JOURNAL OF LESBIAN STUDIES
Guest Editors: Katherine M. Jamieson and Leila E. Villaverde

The Journal of Lesbian Studies will be devoting a thematic journal issue and book on the topic of In/visible Bodies: Lesbian sexualities and sporting spaces. All thematic issues of the Journal of Lesbian Studies are simultaneously reprinted in book form by Harrington Park Press, the book affiliate of Haworth Press. We hope that the resulting book will be used in lesbian studies courses and will be available in feminist bookstores.

CALL FOR PAPERS - In/visible Bodies: Lesbian sexualities and sporting spaces

While previous explorations of sexuality and sport have emphasized negotiation of identities and gaining of access, this Issue takes analytic aim at Lesbian sporting spaces. From this perspective it seems most productive to give critical attention to the wider social and cultural contexts within which Lesbian sexualities and sport comingle under particular relations of power. Moreover, it seems timely to interrogate the range of sporting spaces available and retrace the origins of lesbian sexualities in sporting contexts, including analyses of physical culture, leisure, physical education, youth sport, exercise, and outdoor physical pursuits to name a few. As well, the need to theorize lesbian sexualities and the underpinning categories of sex/race/gender/ability is becoming increasingly important given the ways in which new articulations of sport, sexuality, and corporeality are occurring in varied social and cultural contexts. Accordingly, this Issue of Journal of Lesbian Studies sets out to explore historical, political, and critical relationships between sport and lesbian sexualities. Thus, we invite scholarship that questions power relations that (re)produce categories of sexuality making certain bodies in/visible. We are especially interested in work that illuminates the interconnections between sport, physical culture, embodiment, and sexualities, as well as analyses that willingly disrupt the impasse of binaries and articulate new analytical perspectives and methodological strategies.

Submissions of empirical and theoretical work are welcome from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary viewpoints including but not limited to sociology, cultural studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, psychology, geography, history, anthropology, and pedagogy. We also seek scholarship that advances a “trans-“ research agenda and articulates sexualities as multiple ruptured norms rendered visible through their sporting embodiments.

Potential topics might include:
*sport, sexualities and intersections with gender, class and race
*postcolonial and/ or “trans-“ critiques of lesbian sexualities and sport
*lesbian sexualities as determinant of sport spaces
*sport and legibility of lesbian bodies
*methodologies for queering sport studies and lesbian sexualities
*sport and the sexualization of space
*sport and the performance of subaltern identities
*critiques of sport media normalizations of lesbian sexualities
*the construction of lesbianism in sport media and literature
*corporeal power and hierarchies of sexualities in sporting spaces
*youth sporting spaces, lesbian sexualities and processes of containment
*the politics of sport and lesbian sexualities in nationalist and supra-nationalist formations
*the relationship between queer subjects, biopolitics and necropolitics
*challenges to hegemonic sexualities in sport
*points of con/divergence in lesbian, feminist, and sport-related social movements

Please send abstracts of up to 500 words as a .doc file to Kathy Jamieson and Leila Villaverde at invisiblebodies@gmail.com by November 15th, 2007. Final articles due Mach 1st, 2007, 10-15 pages in length.