​CFP: Queer Media Temporalities
Special Issue of
Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media
Winter 2018
 
The critical importance of screen media to queer identities and cultural practices has been well documented. Queer media studies has traditionally concerned itself with the analysis of screen texts that purport to represent LGBTQ lives and characters; the unique attributes of queer audiences and fans; and the possiblities that queer reading strategies offer. More recently, in light of the humanities’ archival ‘turn’, which is indebted to both Foucauldian notions of genealogy and to new materialisms, scholars have begun to explore relationships among queerness, temporality and media history. This special issue of Alphaville invites papers that address the queer potentials of time-based film and screen media, with a particular interest in exporing temporalities that inform, or are invoked or generated by, texts and practices of queer media history and historiography.
 
Numerous scholars have examined relationships among queerness, marginality and history. Carolyn Dinshaw argues that the erasure of LGBTQ histories produces a ‘queer desire for history’ (2007 178). The editors of In Queer Futures: Reconsidering Ethics, Activism and the Political write that ‘genealogies and generations are among the most contested but also vividly discussed subjects in queer theory’ (2016 1). Roderick A. Ferguson, Judith Butler and Lee Edelman propose, in different contexts, that queerness rejects linear timelines and heterosexualist notions of kinship, generation and reproduction. Ferguson considers sexualized black stereotypes, both straight and queer, as ‘figures outside the rational time of capital, nation, and family’ (2007 180); resistant to the regime that Elizabeth Freeman has termed ‘chrononormativity’.
 
How do atypical temporalities and strategic anachronisms queerly intersect with, and potentially reconstruct, media forms and practices? Does queer media (and its histories) challenge or conform to the Enlightenment rhetoric of progress that flavours contemporary political discourses on marriage equality and the mainstreaming of (certain) LGBTQ rights? How does queer media time unfold during a period of growing economic inequality and political precarity amidst the resurgence of fascist nationalism in the era of Brexit and Trump?
 
The editors seek proposals on topics including, but not limited to:
 
  • Queer screen media and neoliberal temporalities
  • Queer aging
  • Queer archives
  • Queer media futurism
  • Genealogy and generation in queer media histories
  • Queer media in the era of Trump and Brexit
  • Queer media and white/right-wing nationalism
  • Queer media and straight time
 
Potential contributors are invited to submit a 300-word abstract and a 200-word biographical note by December 10, 2017 to the Issue Editors, Maria Pramaggiore and Páraic Kerrigan at alphavillequeermediatime@gmail.com. Authors will be notified in January 2018. Following acceptance, completed articles of 6,000 words, adhering to Alphaville Guidelines (MLA and House Style), are due by May 1, 2018.
 
Selected References
 
Dinshaw, Carolyn, et al. 2007. ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities: a Roundtable Discussion.’ GLQ: : A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 13 (2-3): 177-195.
 
Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke UP.
 
Ferguson, Roderick A. 2007. ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities: a Roundtable Discussion.’ GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 13 (2-3): 177-195.
 
Freeman, Elizabeth. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke UP.
 
Halberstam, J. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies and Subcultural Lives. NYU Press.
 
Kaun, Anne, Johan Fornas, Staffan Ericson. 2016. ‘Media Times: Mediating Time—Temporalizing Media.’ International Journal of Communication 10: 5206–5212
 
McCallum, E. L. and  Mikko Tuhkanen. 2011. Queer Times, Queer Becomings. Albany: SUNY Press.
 
McBean, Sam. 2015. Feminism’s Queer Temporalities. New York: Routledge.
 
Papailias, Penelope. 2017. ‘(Re)sounding Histories: On the Temporalities of the Media Event.’ Social Analysis 61.1. http://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/social-analysis/61/1/sa610106.xml
 
Yekani, Elahe Haschemi,  Eveline Kilian, and Beatrice Michaelis. 2013. ‘Introduction.” In Queer Futures: Reconsidering Ethics, Activism and the Political. New York: Routledge.