[Air-L] REMINDER: Queering Middle Eastern Cyberscapes: call for contributions

[Adi Kuntsman]

Reminder: deadline for abstracts is February the 1st.
Apologies for cross-posting; please distribute widely
thank you




 
Queering
Middle Eastern Cyberscapes
Special issue of Journal of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies
http://sites.google.com/site/queeringmideasterncyberscapes/home 
 
Guest Editors: Noor Al-Qasimi and Adi Kuntsman
 
Call for Papers
 
Digital media and cybercultures have long been explored as fields of
identity formation, cultural contestations, and political tensions. Digital
mediascapes have also been of particular interest to scholars of gender and
sexuality for their potential to transform some gendered, racial, and sexual
power structures while reaffirming, and often violently reinforcing, others.
This special issue of Journal of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies aims to
bring feminist and queer analysis of media and communication technologies
(the Internet, mobile phones, surveillance technologies, digital television,
and telecommunication) to the field of the Middle East as both a
geo-cultural space and a political entity. 
 
Our intention is to examine the intersections, tensions, and
co-constitutions of queer sexualities and communication technologies; queerness
as a form of digitalized affect and as a political practice; mediated violence
and violence of mediation; new technological frontiers and frontiers of
identities; and practices of everyday use and digitalized imaginaries. We hope
to explore these and other phenomena as they emerge in Middle Eastern countries
and communities and their diasporas. In recent years, much work has focused on
media in the Middle East, and gender/sexuality in the Middle East; however,
there is a paucity of scholarship on the intersection of these fields. Still
less work has emphasized queering as a political metaphor in relation to the
field of Middle East Studies. The aim of this special issue is to acknowledge
the utility of a postcolonial queer critique as applied to this region and its
diasporas.
 
We are soliciting work that engages with the intersection of media
and sexuality with reference to the Middle East. Possible topics thus include:
 
Surveillance,
war on terror 
The
policing of sexuality
Orientalism
in new media cultures
Governmentality,
biopolitics, and the Middle East
Sexuality
and media censorship
Media
technologies (e.g., YouTube, mobile phones, bluetooth, picture/video messaging)
and queerness
Queer
and/or social networking websites (e.g., Facebook, MySpace)
Queer
Middle Eastern diasporas in cyberspace
HIV/AIDS-related
online communities
Homophobia
LGBT
and NGO activism
Drag,
cross-dressing, butch/femme identities, other queer subjectivities
Gay
imperialism
 
We welcome abstracts of articles to be considered for inclusion in
this special volume. Please send a bio and a 500-word abstract detailing the
topic of your article, the overall context, your material, methodology, and
theoretical argument by the 1st of February 2010 to qmecissue at googlemail.com . Authors
will be notified by the 15th of February 2010 of the outcome of their
submissions. If accepted, full papers should be submitted by the1st of July 2010.
Papers will then be reviewed individually in the standard double-blind review
process.

We also welcome shorter pieces of creative or analytical writing (up
to 1000 words, or 4000 words for interviews) or visual material on the theme of
this special volume. These pieces may be topical and/or polemical. They are not
sent out to be peer-reviewed but are selected by the editors of the issue. If
you would like to submit a short piece, please contact us to discuss the format
and deadlines.
 
Abstracts and inquiries about this issue should be sent to qmecissue at googlemail.com .