[ecrea] CFP: Media Spaces of Gender and Sexuality

CFP: Media Spaces of Gender and Sexuality
Media Fields Journal
University of California, Santa Barbara

This issue of Media Fields investigates the connections between media, 
space, gender, and sexuality, seeking conversations that center on these 
interrelations and negotiations. We invite papers that raise questions 
of how media spaces construct gender, and how gender, in turn, 
constructs media spaces; how spaces condition and are conditioned by 
gender performances and sexual practices; and how gender legibility 
limits (or allows) access to various media spaces.

Film and media scholarship historically came of age through its study of 
the relationship between gender, sexuality, and media. Much has been 
written about the status of women as objects of the cinematic gaze, as 
well as about the status of female and queer-identified subjects as 
media producers. Yet in more recent times, issues of gender and 
sexuality have once again become marginalized in academic discourse, 
revealing the need for new explorations that coincide with the impact of 
the “spatial turn.” In this age of conflict, dissent, surveillance, and 
migration—when the study of media is often also the study of the 
precariousness and dynamism of the spatial—it is particularly important 
to trace the interconnections between space, media, and gender.

We are inspired by the work of those film and media scholars who have 
explored such interconnections. Lynn Spigel’s seminal book on the 
gendered discourse surrounding domestic television viewing provides us 
with one useful example, as does Lucas Hilderbrand’s forthcoming work on 
the culture of gay bars after Stonewall. While some scholars like Spigel 
and Hilderbrand have studied the connections between gender, space, and 
media in their own work, fewer media studies journals have made this 
topic a primary focus. As a result, we seek scholarship that deals with 
space in a range of ways: essays might discuss online spaces that allow 
for specific negotiations of gender or sexuality, or with gender 
embodiment in physical spaces of various scales, from the very local 
(the living room, for example) to the global.

Essays might also draw upon feminist interventions into 
Marxist/historical materialist theories of space, as well as engaging 
the intersections between gender, race, and class. These important 
intersections exceed the label, “identity politics”—a label that we feel 
is now often deployed in order to debunk the continued relevance of 
gender and sexuality to any scholarly conversation. While we do indeed 
call for political approaches to gender and space—essays informed by the 
agendas of feminist and queer activism—we stress that gender and 
sexuality are not merely areas of special interest, but are instead 
structuring principles of discrimination that permeate our lives on a 
number of registers.

Thus, our approach is multivalent. We invite submissions that consider 
this complexity, possibly addressing the following topics:

--Transnational Queer and Feminist Media: How are flows of bodies, 
labor, capital, and images gendered and sexualized?

--Queering Questions of Scale: How does heterosexism delimit notions of 
nation, state, and the transnational?

--Gendered Spaces of Conflict and Dissent: How do media contribute to 
the gendering of the different spaces of war and dissent as well as of 
the subjects who are involved?

--Gender, Sexuality, and Online Spaces: How are social media practices 
and spaces gendered and sexualized?

--Queer/Feminist Gaming: representations of gendered and sexualized 
spaces in mainstream video games, gendered geographies of video game 
production, gendered spaces of gaming culture

--Spaces of Surveillance: How is surveillance fundamentally gendered, 
sexualized, and spatialized? How does voyeurism continue to bolster 
certain experiences of space and place?

--Gendered Infrastructures: How are media infrastructures gendered, and 
why does this matter?

--Gender, Sexuality and Access: How do gender and its legibility (e.g., 
normativity) result in certain types of access to particular spaces?

We are looking for essays of 1500-2500 words, digital art projects, and 
audio or video interviews exploring the relationship between gender, 
sexuality, and space. We encourage approaches to this topic from 
scholars in cinema and media studies, anthropology, architecture, art 
and art history, communication, ecology, geography, literature, 
musicology, sociology, and other relevant fields.

Feel free to contact issue co-editors, Hannah Goodwin and Lindsay 
Palmer, with proposals and inquiries.
Email submissions to (submissions /at/ mediafieldsjournal.org) by May 30th, 2013.



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