Call for Papers
WSQ Special Issue: Viral
Special Editors: Patricia Clough and Jasbir Puar
The viral most often is invoked in contemporary parlance to point to the
intensified speed and reach of information transit, especially in relation
to the internet. It also refers to indiscriminate exchanges, often linked
with notions of bodily contamination, uncontainability, unwelcome
transgression of border and boundaries. More positively it points to the
porosity, indeed the conviviality, of what has been treated as opposed:
information and matter, digital and biological, body and mind, organic and
non-organic life. The concept of the viral raises questions about the
assumptions informing our thinking about life on the one hand and the
transmission of knowledge or circulation of data on the other -- broadly
speaking, relations between epistemology and ontology. Or to put it another
way, viral processes pressure our assumptions about the actual and the
virtual.
Fast becoming the figure and form of movement, of its speeds and
trajectories, viral transmission is eliciting responses that open up
pathways or free up access but also edit, stifle, gag, or repress. The
event of the viral, therefore, informs discussions about biopolitical
governance, securitization of hetero and homo-nationalism, policed racial,
sexual and gender bodily formations, surveilled communication and social
media, and censored or concentrated knowledge formations in politics, new
media, art, performance, architecture, design, medicine, journalism,
literature, music. In this special issue of WSQ titled Viral, we invite a
rethinking of institutions of education, family, religion, health, military,
media, law, welfare, insurance, financialization, with effects that are
differently distributed over various populations, bodies, nations, regions,
territories, and temporalities. We seek, in Viral, to inaugurate an
inventive cultural criticism from scholars from a wide range of disciplines
engaged with a wide range of topics.
Patricia Ticiento Clough and Jasbir K. Puar, the guest editors of this
special issue of WSQ on Viral, welcome academic papers from a variety of
disciplinary approaches including theory, empirical research, literary and
cultural studies, biology, physics, geography, design as well as creative
prose, poetry, artwork, memoir and biography. Suggested topics may include
but are not limited to:
Biosphere
Digital Environments
Hacking
Social networking
Parasitic architecture
Clouding
Dirt
Aesthetic Capitalism
Twitter Politics
Contagion
Transmissions and exchanges
Porous matter
Flux and Flow
Pollution
Communication Leaks
Biomedia
Genetics
Infectious ideas
Quantum Computing
Social movements
Migration and Immigration
Financial markets
Electronic Literature
Robotics
Technical Evolution
Nanotechnologies
Memes
Interspeciality
If submitting academic work, please send articles by March 15, 2011 to the
guest editors, Patricia Ticiento Clough and Jasbir K. Puar at
(WSQViralIssue /at/ gmail.com) . Submission should not exceed 20 double spaced, 12
point font pages. Full submission guidelines may be found at:
http://www.feministpress.org/wsq/submission-guidelines. Articles must
conform to WSQ guidelines in order to be considered for submission.
Poetry submissions: Please review previous issues of WSQ to see what type of
submissions we prefer before submitting poems. Please note that poetry
submissions may be held for six months or longer. Simultaneous submissions
are acceptable if the poetry editor is notified immediately of acceptance
elsewhere. We do not accept work that has been previously published. Please
paste poetry submissions into the body of the e-mail along with all contact
information. Poetry submissions should be sent to WSQ's poetry editor,
Kathleen Ossip, at (WSQpoetry /at/ gmail.com) by March 15, 2011.
Prose submissions: Please review previous issues of WSQ to see what type of
submissions we prefer before submitting prose. Please note that prose
submissions may be held for six months or longer. Simultaneous submissions
are acceptable if the prose editor is notified immediately of acceptance
elsewhere. We do not accept work that has been previously published. Please
provide all contact information in the body of the e-mail. Fiction, essay,
and memoir submissions should be sent to WSQ's fiction/nonfiction editor,
Jocelyn Lieu, at (WSQCreativeProse /at/ gmail.com) by March 15, 2011.
Art submissions should be sent to the guest editors, Patricia Clough and
Jasbir Puar at (WSQViralIssue /at/ gmail.com) by March 15, 2011. After art is
reviewed and accepted, accepted art must be sent to the journal's managing
editor on a CD that includes all artwork of 300 DPI or greater, saved as
4.25 inches wide or larger. These files should be saved as individual JPEGS
or TIFFS.
