[ecrea] Call for Papers: Happiness - A special issue of Writing from Below

Emergent research into happiness is still largely situated in fields 
such as sociology, psychology, and neuroscience. Traditionally the 
uncontested domain of the Humanities, the question of “How should we 
live?” is too rarely approached in contemporary literary and cultural 
studies. Indeed, even in a thriving field such as affect studies, 
research still largely focuses on negative emotions, ugly feelings 
(Ngai), shame (Probyn), paranoia (Sedgwick), failure (Halberstam), and 
the cruelty of optimism (Berlant). But perhaps the critical tide is 
turning. Scholars are beginning to theorise the end of our 
well-rehearsed “hermeneutics of suspicion,” and conjecturing what comes 
after (Felski). They are mapping the potential path for a “eudaimonic 
criticism” (Pawelski & Moore) and an “ethics of hope” (Braidotti), 
looking towards a more positive future (Muñoz). Critical and historical 
studies on empathy (Meghan; Keen), joy (Potkay) and happiness itself 
(Ahmed) are also emerging.

Inspired by the growing body of scholarship on optimistic 
representations or gender, sexuality, and queerness,/ Writing from 
Below/ enters the fray with this invitation to explore and interrogate 
positive, successful, fulfilling, life-affirming expressions of gender 
and sexuality in contemporary or historical literature, culture, and 
society.

Papers could engage with (but are not limited to):

  * Pleasure, joy, jouissance, delight, splendour, enchantment, empathy,
    and kindness
  * Love, passion, and /amour fou/
  * Middlebrow pleasure
  * Living the queer life, and queer(ing) happiness
  * Eudaimonia, mindfulness, and wellbeing
  * Eudaimonic reading, and the eudaimonic turn in cultural and literary
    studies
  * The hermeneutics of suspicion, paranoid and reparative reading, and
    their aftermath
  * Ethical criticism, the ethics of hope, and hopelessness
  * The body as site of happiness, joy, pleasure, etc.
  * Affect, the theories and/or histories of positive emotions
  * Celebration, and celebration as protest
  * Burlesque, clowning, circus, carnivals, and the carnivalesque
  * Kitsch, camp, and drag
  * Sex and play, sex lives, fun
  * Vitality, verve, vigour, and liveliness
  * Biological life, /bios/, /zoe/, survival, /sur-vivre/ [living-on],
    affirmation
  * The utopian tendencies of gender studies and queer theory
  * The (queer) future, queer futurity, and happy endings

Gender studies and queer theory are located across and between 
disciplines, and so we welcome submissions from across (and outside of, 
against and up against) the full cross-/inter/-trans-disciplinary 
spectrum, and from inside and outside of conventional academia.

Do not be limited. Be brave. Play with form, style, and genre. Invent, 
demolish, reimagine.

The deadline for submissions is *29 May 2017. *

To submit, visit our website: www.writingfrombelow.org.au 
<http://www.writingfrombelow.org.au/>

Written submissions, whether critical or creative, should be between 
*3,000 and 6,000 words* in length, and should adhere strictly to the 
16th edition of the /Chicago Manual of Style/.

All submissions—critical, creative, and those falling in between; no 
matter the format or medium—will be subject to a process of 
*double-blind peer review*.

For more information, please contact our guest editor, Dr Juliane 
Roemhild: (J.Roemhild /at/ latrobe.edu.au) <mailto:(J.Roemhild /at/ latrobe.edu.au)>

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