[Air-L] Queer Circuits Special Issue of Women & Performance

[Benjamin Haber]

Deadline for papers is June 1st! Please send me an email if you have any
questions.



*QUEER CIRCUITS IN ARCHIVAL TIMES: PERFORMANCE, NETWORKED DATA, DIGITAL
CULTURE <https://www.womenandperformance.org/submit/current-cfps/>*



*Guest Editors*: *Benjamin Haber*, PhD Candidate Sociology, Graduate
Center, CUNY +

*Daniel J Sander*, PhD Candidate Performance Studies, NYU

*Submission Deadline: June 1st 2017*



We live in an increasingly digital world, where conflicts over control,
violence, and centralization play out in computational landscapes. The
conscious and unconscious activities of queerly entangled bodies are
archived for speculative monetization by a variety of proprietary digital
networks, whose central motivation is to serve advertisements and measure
populations rather than to promote vibrant and just social life. Racialized
and gendered violence operates at queer timescales, distributing life
chances outside of representational frames. At the same time, queer digital
culture is providing new openings for Donna Haraway’s vision of
“transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities.”



Haraway's *A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism
in the late twentieth century *remains one of the most influential
predecessors for the lines of thought animating this special issue. It is
important to remember that in articulating her vision of a thoroughly
postmodern feminism, Haraway was primarily drawing on two bodies of work —
feminist science fiction and women of color feminism in the work of Octavia
E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Audre Lorde, and Cherríe Moraga, for example.
That is, the cyborg is an inherently intersectional figure. If queer
culture is to self-critically engage with the digital, then it will have to
take into account the much vaster and more complicated gridlock of identity
and affiliation, in which sexual practices and orientations are but one
factor. While *Queer Circuits in Archival Times* builds on this lineage and
the groundbreaking work of Sandy Stone, Patricia Clough, Jasbir Puar, Kara
Keeling and many others, we recognize that these abnormal times require
queer departures from the limits of form, history, and epistemology.



As new media studies and the digital humanities continue to be established
as academic disciplines, we look to inf(l)ect this scholarship with the
insights of feminist and queer knowledge production. We are interested in
digital performance and inventive critique to theorize LGBTQ lives in a
strikingly fluid legal, media, and political landscape. Just as important,
however, we see queer thought playing an essential role in analyzing
digital life beyond marginalized sexual cultures. How might we queer these
digital networks that are increasingly constitutive of how we understand
and witness the social? How can we reflexively and critically engage with
queer social formations that seem to resonate with data capitalism? What
archival practices and performances can help reinvigorate the queer
histories forgotten in the linear narratives of gay progress?



This special issue was inspired by the conference *Queer Circuits in
Archival Times: Experimentation and Critique of Networked Data*
<http://queercircuits.com/>, co-sponsored by *Women & Performance*, which
took place across CUNY, the NYPL, and Kilroy Metal Ceiling in May of 2016.
This special issue looks to expand on these interdisciplinary conversations
while inspiring new creative and critical interventions. *Queer Circuits in
Archival Times* aims to bring together an array of both established and
emerging scholars and artists working at the intersections of new media
studies, performance studies, queer theory, feminist theory, and
aesthetics.





*Topics of consideration and points of departure may include, but are not
limited to: *



-       Affect, identity, and representation after the internet

-       Critical reflections on queer theory in light of the digital

-       Digital performance of/and gender and sexuality

-       Hacked software and dubious hardware

-       Haptic reorganizations of boundaries between body/world and
body/mind

-       Intimacy and alienation and/of (queer) digital culture

-       Monstrous digital assemblages across space/time/identity/species

-       Online queer collectivity, alternative kinship, and activism

-       Quantification of sex/sexuality/self

-       Queer race/Racialized queerness online

-       Queer (social) media

-       Queer theoretical frames and uses of digital media and archiving

-       The queer biodigital/ data and the queer inhuman/nonhuman





All submissions to Queer Circuits in Archival Times should be submitted to:
*Queercircuits at gmail.com* <Queercircuits at gmail.com>



For additional submission guidelines please click here
<https://www.womenandperformance.org/submit/>



For additional submission guidelines please click here
<https://www.womenandperformance.org/submit/>