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[Commlist] CfP 7.0: Between Bodies and Homes
Tue Apr 01 12:27:05 GMT 2025
Soapbox 7.0: call for papers
Between Bodies and Homes
— peer reviewed; open to critical and artistic work; submission
deadline: April 30; extended proposals —
To feel like we belong is one of our most common desires. Our bodily
relation to home is not a simple one: it is marked by hostile power
structures. These structures plunge the body into an interconnected web
of demarcations, mediations, and hierarchisation, which determine one’s
ability or failure to feel at home. Race, gender, ability, and class are
factors that designate one’s sense of home. Labels further differentiate
between bodies, some rendered political (“immigrant,” “refugee”), while
others insidiously a-political (“expat”). How do we think with the body
in ways that address its complicated relationship to home? What are the
ways to engage with our bodily positionalities that may allow for a more
equitable habitation?
Thinking with aestheSis that privileges sensing over totalising
reasoning of aestheTics, María Lugones sees the body through its
permeability, which “allows us to reconceive about the world we live
in.” Turning towards the sensorial relationality, we discover that the
fixed, man-made, ‘rational’ lines that demarcate home and body as
separate, contain leaks. Leaks that bring the body home. For its eighth
issue, Soapbox: Journal for Cultural Analysis invites (young)
researchers, (established) scholars, and creatives alike to submit works
that consider practices, experiences, and methodologies that uncover
punctures and cavities of structures, lines, boundaries, and borders.
What seeps, spills, or flows through these holes? What exists in between
home and body that informs who and where we are? What are the moments
when the body and home are torn apart? And when do they collapse into one?
Decolonial theory offers one perspective from which we can explore the
leaks between homes and bodies. For non-Western subjects, when one has
seen oneself as the Other through Western eyes, the decolonial journey
begins to return to one’s bodies and homes. Quijano teaches us that the
relationship between European and other cultures is one of “subject” and
“object,” while Tlostanova, in her seminal paper “Can the Post-Soviet
Think?,” reminds us that inventing theory “remains a privilege of the
West.” Nevertheless, these man-made divisions only appear as stable and
can be questioned through embodied relationality that allows
“communities and social movements to defend their territories and worlds
against the ravages of neoliberal globalization” (Escobar). Lugones
calls for “a resistant permeable sensing” (Calderon). Vasquez speaks of
worldhood and earth-hood, the possibility of being at home in and with
others and with Earth that stands in opposition to the homelessness of
modernity’s artifice. Taking a decolonial lens on Merleau-Ponty’s flesh
and Barthes’s notion of punctum, Ortega argues that Latinx art carnally
pierces with love that frees from dominant knowledges. Finally, Anzaldúa
asks us to stay with the border and perceive it as a wound that offers
hybridity.
other possible access points:
affective leaks
Sarah Ahmed writes that “being-at-home suggests that the subject and
space leak into each other”: home becomes a second skin that allows for
a receptive touch. What does it mean to feel at home, and how does the
body sense home? Rather than spatiotemporal, can home become an emotion?
phenomenological leaks
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological attention to the in-between of the body
and the world that gives form to a chiasmatic flesh has long entertained
cultural scholars, with Baker and Sobchak contributing to understanding
cinema as tactile. How can the phenomenological attention to bodies and
the world inform our understanding of home?
architectural leaks
Architecture architectures—or builds—a predetermined relationship
between subject and structure. Dwellings provide shelter just as much as
they violently enclose. Ingold advocates a dwelling perspective that
argues it is the surroundings that shape the mind and not the opposite.
Where does the body stop and the city start?
posthuman leaks
In Tuana’s concept of viscous porosity, it is the membrane that
facilitates the interactions. In what way do the permeable borders mimic
membranes when choosing who to accept and who to refuse? Re-thinking the
neoliberal ideal, can a better future exist within the membrane?
leaks and memory studies
How do forms of violence pertain to what Ann Laura Stoler theorizes as
‘disabled’ and ‘dissociated’ histories? What does it mean to be-long in
that what no-longer exists or never existed? How does nostalgia entail a
violent form of be-longing that implicates the present? (Boym).
leaks in everyday life
Marxist sociologist-philosopher Henri Lefebvre tells us that “a
revolution will come about when, and only when, people can no longer
live their everyday lives.” A leakage, a failure of infrastructure, may
precisely set such a process in motion. At what point—while cooking,
walking the dog, showering, seeing friends—do we notice the droplets
dripping from the ceiling, forming a deep puddle in the centre of the
living room?
the details:
We are inviting extended proposals in MLA formatting and referencing
style to be submitted to (submissions /at/ soapboxjournal.net)
<mailto:(submissions /at/ soapboxjournal.net)> by April 30th, 2025. Each
proposal must include an abstract of 300-500 words and a brief outline
of the content and its order (up to 200 words, can be in bullet
points!). The outline is meant to indicate the intended structuring and
weighing of the various elements of your text; we understand and expect
that this will change again during drafting and editing. Submissions
should be sent as a file attachment to the email, and the file's content
should be anonymised.
Guidelines for creative submissions are more flexible. They can be
finished works, word-based or otherwise, but please keep in mind our
spatial limitations: we publish and print in book format, and we have a
limited number of pages to give to each submission. This year, we are
also open to visual submissions (excluding moving image), provided they
are accompanied by an artistic statement and an explanation of how the
work connects to the theme. A sense of the formatting possibilities can
be garnered from previous issues and our Instagram (open-access PDF
versions are available on our website).
We will try to send out conditional acceptance emails by May 23rd. Upon
acceptance, the authors of the academic essays will be asked to submit a
4000-6000-word full draft by August 25th. The editing and publishing
process will span the next academic year (September 2025 - February 2026).
It would be very helpful if you could let us know in your email where
you saw our CFP. If you have any questions regarding your submission, do
not hesitate to contact us at (submissions /at/ soapboxjournal.net)
<mailto:(submissions /at/ soapboxjournal.net)>.
Soapbox Journal does not charge author publication fees.
works referenced
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute
Books, 1987.
Escobar, Arturo. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence,
Autonomy, and the
Making of Worlds. Duke University Press, 2018.
Meda Calderon, Denise. “Decolonial Movidas: María Lugones’s Notion of
Decolonial
Aesthesis through Cosmologies.” The Pluralist, vol. 18, no. 1, 2023, pp.
22–31,
https://doi.org/10.5406/19446489.18.1.03
<https://doi.org/10.5406/19446489.18.1.03>.
Ortega, Mariana. Carnalities. Duke University Press, 2024.
Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural
Studies, vol. 21, no. 2-3,
2007, pp. 168–178, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601164353
<https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601164353>.
Tlostanova, Madina. “Can the Post-Soviet Think? On Coloniality of
Knowledge, External
Imperial and Double Colonial Difference.” Intersections, vol. 1, no. 2,
2015, pp.
38-58, https://doi.org/10.17356/ieejsp.v1i2.38
<https://doi.org/10.17356/ieejsp.v1i2.38>.
Vazquez, Rolando. “Precedence, Earth and the Anthropocene: Decolonizing
Design.” Design
Philosophy Papers, vol. 15, no. 1, 2017, pp. 77-91,
https://doi.org/10.1080/14487136.2017.1303130
<https://doi.org/10.1080/14487136.2017.1303130>.
further suggestions
Ahmed, Sara. “Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement.”
International
Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, 1999, pp. 329–347,
https://doi.org/10.1177/136787799900200303
<https://doi.org/10.1177/136787799900200303>.
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material
Self. Indiana
University Press, 2010.
Barker, Jennifer M. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience.
University Of
California Press, 2009.
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2001.
Deleuze, Gilles and Tom Conley. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.
University Of
Minnesota Press, 2012.
Fisher, Mark. “What Is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 1,2012,
pp. 16–24, 2012,
https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16
<https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16>.
Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment. Routledge, 2000.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by
Alphonso Lingis,
edited by Claude Lefort, Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Mogoș, Petrică and Laura Naum. “On Easternfuturism: Imagining Multiple
Futures.” Kajet
Journal, no. 05, 2022.
Lefebvre, Henri. Everyday Life in the Modern World. Translated by Sacha
Rabinovitch,
Harper & Row, 1971.
Parvulescu, Anca. “Eastern Europe as Method.” The Slavic and East
European Journal, vol.
63, no. 4, 2019, pp. 470-481, https://doi.org/10.30851/634002
<https://doi.org/10.30851/634002>.
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Edited by Gabriel
Rockhill, Bloomsbury
Academic, 2004.
Rigney, Ann. “Remaking Memory and the Agency of the Aesthetic.” Memory
Studies, vol.
14, no. 1, 2021, pp. 10–23, https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698020976456
<https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698020976456>.
Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture.
University Of
California Press, 2004.
Stoler, A. L. “Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France.”
Public Culture, vol.
23, no. 1, 2011, pp. 121–156, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2010-018
<https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2010-018>.
Toop, David. Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary
Worlds. Serpent’s
Tail, 2001.
Tuana, Nancy. “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina.” Material
Feminisms, edited by Susan
Hekman and Stacy Alaimo, Indiana University Press, 2008.
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