[ecrea] Call for Papers: “All Hail the Queenz: A Queer Fem inist Recalibration of Hip Hop Scholarship”

Call for Papers:


“All Hail the Queenz: A Queer Feminist Recalibration of Hip Hop Scholarship”


A Special Issue of Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory.

Issue Guest Editors: Shanté Paradigm Smalls (University of New Mexico) 
and Jessica N. Pabón (New York University)

Submission deadline: May 1, 2013

Women and Performance invites submissions for a special issue, “All Hail 
the Queenz: A Queer Feminist Recalibration of Hip Hop Scholarship.” The 
editors welcome scholarly articles and performative texts that 
foreground feminist and queer performance studies approaches to hip hop 
culture, consumption, and production.

Contemporary rap music, as a stand-in for hip hop culture and 
production, is virtually synonymous with misogyny and homophobia in the 
mainstream US and academic imaginary. We want to explore the range of 
understandings and theories that inform how women and queers experience 
hip hop culture and performance; this issue underscores the multiplicity 
of hip hop culture and rejects a myopic totalizing view of what “the 
culture” does and is. We seek to engage with the wide range of hip hop 
scholars and practitioners working at the intersections of various 
methodologies not always associated with scholarly considerations of hip 
hop (including psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theory, and 
performance theory), as well as methods typical to hip hop 
studies—sociology, Black studies, literature, history, musicology, and 
urban studies. An emerging class of hip hop scholars pressure the givens 
of race, gender, performance, sexuality, region, nationality, artistry, 
and iconography—as a culture that has been in a state of constant 
development for the past forty years, hip hop scholarship is more than 
due for a queer feminist remixing and reimagining.

As coeditors, we challenge the readers of Women & Performance to ask: 
What would a specifically queer feminist performance studies approach to 
hip hop’s culture and production generate in terms of scholarship? How 
does a queer feminist experience and critique revise hip hop studies? 
Why has performance studies had so little to say about hip hop, what 
interventions does performance studies yield? The issue’s focus on 
producing knowledge about hip hop culture that centralizes women, girls 
and queer people will include a range of elements, both popular and 
subcultural: DJ culture, dance, graffiti, human beat boxing, rap music, 
as well as fashion, media and print, organizing, and other forms of 
knowledge production. No matter the genre, hip hop is often conceived 
and misrepresented as a male-dominated culture which casts women and 
girls as an addendum to hip hop rather than as primary producers, 
critics, and consumers. Within the pages of this issue, contributors 
revisit the centrality of feminist and queer artists to the production 
of all elements of hip hop culture and of feminist and queer critique to 
hip hop scholarship. “All Hail the Queenz” intends to tease out the 
nuanced negotiations women, girls, and queer people develop as hip hop 
artists, critics, and consumers participating within this climate.

Through re-centering feminist and queer critiques and female and queer 
performance, “All Hail the Queenz” recalibrates hip hop’s center. By 
recalibrating the center, contributors to this issue refashion hip hop 
historiography and hip hop aesthetics beyond the art of rapping by the 
cisgendered male body. In a kind of textual reperformance, this issue 
takes its title from Queen Latifah’s lyrical demands for respect on her 
first womanist rap classic album, “All Hail the Queen,” and reminds 
readers once again that “stereotypes, they got to go!”

Potential Topics:

    * Alternate Hip Hop historiographies
    * Artist Scholars
    * DJing, technology, gender, sexuality
    * Feminist, queer, trans* aesthetics
    * Feminist, queer, trans* pedagogy
    * Graffiti and gender/sexuality
    * Hip Hop culture and dis/ability
    * Hip Hop diasporas
    * Hip Hop fashion
    * Hip Hop feminism
    * Hip Hop festivals
    * Hip Hop’s hybridity
    * Human Beatboxing
    * Media culture and social networking
    * Nation, Empire, and hip hop
    * Queer feminist hip hop critique
    * Queerness and/in/of hip hop
    * Trans* in/and hip hop

Article submissions should be 6-8,000 words in length and adhere to the 
current Chicago Manual of Style (CMS), author-date format. Performative 
texts should be 2-3,000 words and in any style the author chooses (same 
CMS style as above if using citations). Photo essays are welcome. 
Questions and abstracts for review are welcome before the final deadline.

Complete essays and texts for consideration must be submitted by 11:59 
PM EST, May 1, 2013.

Please send all work to both Shanté Paradigm Smalls and Jessica N. Pabón 
via email (MSWord attachment): shantesmalls@gmail.comand (jnp250 /at/ nyu.edu).

Further submission guidelines may be found at: 
www.womenandperformance.org/submission.html. Women and Performance is a 
peer reviewed journal published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis.



Thanks for circulating!

Best,

Jessica N. Pabón

ABD, Performance Studies New York University
American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellow, 2012-2013
Curator, bob bar gallery, NYC
Email: (jnp250 /at/ nyu.edu)
Blog: artofgettingovaries.wordpress.com
Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/ArtofGettingOvaries
TedxWomen Talk: http://tedxwomen.org/speakers/jessica-pabon/


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