[Commlist] CFP : Engendering (Repurposing)

Call for Papers : 
Engendering (Repurposing) / Genrer (la réutilisation)
A special issue of Intermediality / Intermédialités


Guest Editors: Caroline Bem (Université de Montréal) and Rosanna Maule 
(Concordia University)


Deadline for abstracts: January 10, 2026
Complete articles due: August 1, 2026
Publication: Spring 2027

Call in English : 
http://intermedialites.com/en/call-for-papers-no-49-engendering-repurposing-genrer-la-reutilisation/ 
<http://intermedialites.com/en/call-for-papers-no-49-engendering-repurposing-genrer-la-reutilisation/> 

Appel en français : 
http://intermedialites.com/appel-a-contributions-no-49-genrer-la-reutilisation-engendering-repurposing/ 
<http://intermedialites.com/appel-a-contributions-no-49-genrer-la-reutilisation-engendering-repurposing/> 


This special issue of Intermédialités/Intermediality builds on the 
concept of repurposing from a gender-informed, situated perspective. 
Inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s notion of bricolage, repurposing 
describes derivative and appropriative practices. Within alternative and 
counterculture contexts, it points to critical interventions on 
mainstream texts, media, and infrastructures (Anderson 2009; Arnold & 
Blackman 2023; Caldwell 2006; DelFanti & Södenberg 2018; Maule 2023; 
Renzi 2020). This issue, then, proposes an interdisciplinary 
revisitation of the concept of repurposing from the standpoint of 
feminist and LGBTQIA+ activism, focusing on the ways in which it may 
serve the creation, consolidation, and preservation of collaborative, 
resistant, and relational practices and actions across various 
disciplines, fields, and media. We ask how “repurposing” can be seen as 
a generative concept geared at approaching transhistorical intersections 
of gender and media from an intermedial perspective.

Context

In a cultural industry that, as Benjamin Anderson argues, repurposes 
all critique, the imperative of oppositional media is to remain 
“grounded in praxis and not simply in ideology” (2009, 23–24).

The medial possibilities of repurposing are vast. For instance, by 
embracing repurposing as a creative practice, feminist and queer artists 
address ecological concerns that reject wastefulness and value the 
afterlives of materials. A key early land art piece by Agnes Denes, who 
transformed degraded land into a flourishing environment in Wheatfield—A 
Confrontation (1982), illustrates how repurposing can serve as an 
intersectional, politically engaged, and ecologically aware practice 
that defies capitalist consumption and promotes sustainability. 
Repurposing also takes the form of a central concept in the archival 
remediation of documents and media framed within dominant discourses 
(Brunow 2021; Eichhorn 2013; Rahman & Pratiwi 2023).

In keeping with Intermédialités/Intermediality’s editorial line of 
testing action-concepts against a wide range of media objects, we invite 
contributors to consider how, rather than simply attempt to respond to a 
changing media environment, repurposing practices offer wide-ranging 
opportunities for social change and critical intervention. By bridging 
artistic, ecological, and theoretical spaces, our proposed theorization 
of repurposing provides us with a robust tool for understanding how 
gender, media, and materiality intersect in powerful acts of reclamation 
and resistance.

Framework

The editors invite contributors to theorize “repurposing” drawing on 
concepts and approaches from the fields of both media and gender 
studies. These might include:
•Accounts that build on imaginings of repurposing of preexisting spaces 
for queer experience building, such as, amongst others, José Esteban 
Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009) and the work of queer practitioners, such 
as Sadie Benning, who reconceptualized filmic space through the use of 
repurposed image capture technologies;
•Aesthetics and art practices that reuse, appropriate, and reutilize 
texts, narratives, and artworks from a decolonial perspective — 
contributors are invited to consider repurposing practices by 
individuals, collectives, and communities that view repurposing as a 
strategy of cultural restitution, counter-genealogy, ontogenesis, and 
social justice;
•Within the context of media archeology, reflections on how repurposing 
might work as a means of resisting linear or teleological views of 
history by emphasizing fragmentation, palimpsest, and heterogeneity — 
qualities that parallel the fractured, often nonlinear expressions found 
in feminist and queer art practices;
•Transmedia storytelling, which encourages narratives to evolve across 
various platforms and forms (Jenkins 2006), as a model through which 
repurposing can be seen as an inherently adaptive, fluid practice that 
allows for multiple, intersecting perspectives;
•Contributions that turn to the work of feminist posthumanist scholars 
like Donna Haraway (2007) and Stacy Alaimo (2016), who argue for an 
ethics of “trans-corporeality” — the recognition of interconnectedness 
between human and non-human agents.

Contributions might focus on one of four main axes of investigation 
while maintaining an intermedial approach consistent with the journal’s 
mandate:
•Engendering repurposing: towards an intermedial theory of gender in media;
•Repurposing and the transgenerational history of gendered media;
•The geopolitics of repurposed gender and media practices;
•Ecologically informed critical theory and repurposed gendered media 
practices.

Possible contributions might focus on — but are not limited to — the 
following objects and themes:
•Gender-informed repurposing media practices in painting, photography, 
video, film, TV, internet art, video games, etc. such as the New Queer 
Cinema, alt porn, DIY video games, LGBTQ+ film and media festivals, 
media production collectives, etc.;
•Embodied representations within gender-informed media practices;
•Narratives of self (gender, trauma, illness etc.) within 
gender-informed media practices;
•Repurposing gender-informed media practices in the Global South and/or 
from an Indigenous perspective;
•Gender-informed media archaeology;
•Alternative gendered media histories;
•Media materiality and gender.


Proposals (350–400 words) in English or French should include an 
abstract, a preliminary bibliography (five books or articles), and a 
brief biographical note (discipline, fields of interest, 5–10 lines). 
Proposals will be evaluated based on the originality of the approach, 
thematic relevance, and fit with the journal. They should be sent to the 
guest editors ((caroline.bem /at/ umontreal.ca) 
<mailto:(caroline.bem /at/ umontreal.ca)> and (rosanna.maule /at/ concordia.ca) 
<mailto:(rosanna.maule /at/ concordia.ca)>) by January 10, 2026.


Intermediality/Intermédialités is a biannual journal that publishes 
original articles in English and French evaluated through a blind peer 
review process. No payments from authors are required. For more 
information, please consult the journal’s website: 
http://intermedialites.com <http://intermedialites.com> or available 
issues through the open access portal Érudit: 
https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/im/ 
<https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/im/>.


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