[Commlist] Call for Papers: Trans Celebrity (special issue of Celebrity Studies)

Call for Papers: Trans Celebrity

Special issue of Celebrity Studies Journal, edited by Hannah Yelin, Kat 
Gupta and Alon Lischinsky

Deadline for proposals: 29 February 2024

Full drafts due: 31 October 2024

Celebrities have played an essential role in the circulation of 
knowledge and understanding about trans and gender-nonconforming people. 
Since the media frenzy around Christine Jorgensen's transition propelled 
her to international fame, figures such as Chaz Bono, the Wachowski 
sisters or Sam Smith have been at the centre of public discourses around 
the trans experience, while microcelebrities such as Fox Fisher and Alok 
Vaid-Menon have been key in community-building and activism. But despite 
the many productive ways in which the fields of trans studies and 
celebrity studies can illuminate one another, work in the field remains 
scarce and scattered.

An important concern has been the selectiveness with which the practices 
and frameworks of celebrity culture endow specific biographical 
narratives with visibility. Michael Lovelock (2017) has convincingly 
argued that the cultural legibility of figures such as Caitlyn Jenner is 
granted because their accounts of feeling trapped in a wrong body that 
required work and investment to reveal its authentic self resonate with 
broader discourses about self-actualisation. For the trans community, 
the price of such visibility is the reproduction and amplification of 
patterns of exclusion of transmasculine and gender-nonconforming 
identities. These identities, while being an equally rich site for the 
study of issues of celebrity authenticity, self-making and gendered 
expression, remain under theorised in our field.

Undercurrents of consent and violation are characteristic of wider 
celebrity culture’s economics of access and fascination with the exposé 
(Yelin, 2020) and celebrities frequently express “reluctance” and 
discomfort with their intense condition of social visibility (York, 
2018). The trajectory of trans celebrities is typically marked by the 
need to negotiate their rise to public prominence and privilege with 
trans stigma. Historically this required some trans celebrities to live 
stealth and disguise their gender history, only to be sometimes 
posthumously outed (Billy Tipton); for others, involuntary outing comes 
as part of their fame (Wendy Carlos). Even those figures who openly 
embrace their trans history can struggle with being unwillingly placed 
in the position of public representatives for a complex and diverse 
community

We seek original papers that address trans celebrities for a special 
issue of Celebrity Studies (CSJ), expected 2025 subject to editorial and 
peer review. Papers must be 6000-8000 words long, and explicitly and 
thoroughly grounded in the field of celebrity studies.

Abstracts under 500 words, outlining how the proposed article meets the 
aims of both the special issue and CSJ, should be sent by 29 February 
2024 to the guest editors at (trans.celebrity.studies /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(trans.celebrity.studies /at/ gmail.com)>.

We are committed to addressing inequalities in scholarship and academic 
publishing. We particularly welcome submissions from authors from 
marginalised minorities, authors from the Global South and early career 
researchers.

Topics that the articles may address include, but are not limited to:

  *

    Case studies of specific trans celebrities past and present

  *

    Intersections of trans celebrity with race, ethnicity, class, age,
    sexuality, religion and disability

  *

    Trans celebrity and normativity, “ordinariness” or success

  *

    Trans celebrity, passing and beauty politics

  *

    Retheorising celebrity authenticity in the context of trans celebrity

  *

    Trans celebrities and queerness

  *

    Trans celebrities and their fandoms

  *

    Trans celebrity activism

  *

    Trans microcelebrity and community icons

  *

    Celebrity outside the binary

  *

    Celebrity and the trans closet

  *

    Posthumous trans celebrity

  *

    Trans scholars as public intellectuals

  *

    Transnational circulation of trans celebrity

  *

    Anti-trans celebrity and exclusionary social movements

Celebrity Studies <https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rcel20>(CSJ) is 
a peer-reviewed journal that focuses on the critical exploration of 
celebrity, stardom and fame. It seeks to make sense of celebrity by 
drawing upon a range of (inter)disciplinary approaches, media forms, 
historical periods and national contexts. CSJaddresses key issues in the 
production, circulation and consumption of fame, and its manifestations 
in both contemporary and historical contexts.


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