Call for Papers
“Global Queer and Trans Class Relations”
Special Issue Editors
Emmanuel David, University of Colorado, Boulder
Matt Brim, College of Staten Island (CUNY)
This special issue of ELN is premised on the idea that queer and trans are inevitably intertwined
with class, just as they are also inflected by race, caste, disability, and gender. The coeditors
seek essays that explore the ways in which queer and trans people understand their
overlapping and different positions within class relations and how they experience, manage, and
resist the logics of capital (labor, productivity, accumulation, extraction, consumption, debt, etc).
We are especially interested in essays that examine queer and trans class relations in a
transnational frame. Our goal is not to collect disparate examples from different/ “other”
geographic locations but rather to publish a set of articles that, together, cohere an
understanding of queer and trans class analysis as a methodology for relating across and
among sites of grounded, material experience. This special issue thus hopes to identify and give
space to nascent conversations about emergent and potentially unorthodox queer-class frames
of reference (e.g., South-South lenses; international queer studies formations).
This special issue builds on over three decades of scholarship in queer studies that has
foregrounded queer-class intersections, including milestone conferences like the 1994 CLAGS
conference Homo/Economics: Market and Community in Lesbian and Gay Life and the 2026
CLAGS Queer-Class Relations Conference. The collection of essays is also indebted to work in
the areas of queer Marxism (Liu 2015, 2023) and queer of color analysis, which takes up
materialist critiques (with revision) and provides analytic strategies that disidentify with historical
materialism (Ferguson 2003). In adjacent discussions in transgender studies, a field that is
positioned structurally “against Queer Theory” in the academy (Keegan 2020), trans is often
distinguished from queer on the basis of class, and there is an expanding body of work that
explores the intersection of trans lives and materialist approaches, including trans-political
economy (Irving & Lewis 2017) and trans Marxism (Terán and Travis 2024). Finally, queer
diasporic studies and decolonial queer studies have sought to provincialize queer theory (Liu
2024) and to focus on theorizing from and across the Global South (Gomes Pereira 2019; Silva
and Jacobo 2020). At this intersection, this special issue also extends trans critiques of
economic imperialism (Namaste 2005) and recent work in “transnational queer materialism”
(Jaleel & Savcı 2024). As we draw attention to queer and trans studies' stakes in political
economy and critiques of capital, we seek essays tethered to individual and collective class
histories and relations as they are lived.
Guiding Questions
● How does careful attention to global queer and trans experience clarify but also
obfuscate class contradictions?
● In what ways does work at this intersection contribute to the ongoing reassessment of
the fields of queer and trans studies?
● Thinking broadly about textual sources, empirical data, and interpretive methods, what
concrete evidence/material experiences can be used to support work in this area?
● How does cultural production (literature, art, performance) speak to this set of
questions?
Potential Topics
The Global Queer and Trans Class Relations special issue editors invite contributions that
explore topics on, but not limited to:
● Transnational networks of queer and trans solidarity
● Transmisogyny as a classed phenomenon
● Queer Marxism
● Geographies of queer and uneven development (Global South, postsocialist, rural)
● Latino/a/e queer-class fiction/cultural production
● Translating class across queer communities
● Sex work
● Global racial capitalism
● Transgender and HIV healthcare as a border issue
● “Queer” refugees and asylees
● Labor and value
● Class stratification in the international queer academy
● Carceral geographies and trans/queer-class formations
● Queer gentrification
● Neoliberalism then and now in queer studies
● Capitalism and queer resistance
● Classed archives
● Erotics of class crossover
● Emergent forms and structures of queer-class relations
● Queer and trans critiques of empire and economic imperialism
Timeline
Please submit essays of approximately 6,000-7,000 words by September 1, 2026. Submit
manuscripts directly through Editorial Manager (http://www.edmgr.com/eln/). For more
information about submissions, see Author Guidelines. Following external peer review, revised
submissions will be due by mid-January 2027. The special issue will appear in October 2027
(Vol. 65, No. 2).
This special issue will include an introduction by the Special Issue editors (Matt Brim, Executive
Director of CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at CUNY Graduate Center and Professor of
Queer Studies at the College of Staten Island, and Emmanuel David, Associate Professor of
Women & Gender Studies at University of Colorado Boulder)
“Genre, Past and Present”
Special Issue Editor
Audrey Jaffe, University of Toronto
Genre has traditionally been seen as a framework or series of frameworks for organizing texts (and other artworks) so they may be analyzed with some degree of precision, yet the meaning of the term has always been unstable. Disagreements arise around specific classifications, and the term has often been redefined or simply deployed, without explanation, in different ways. The novel, for instance, has been subject to numerous and diverging definitions, from (to name only a few) Gyorgy Lukacs to Mikhail Bakhtin to Ralph Rader to Priya Joshi. Such classifications, no matter how numerous, are familiar. To these, however, we may now add such new terms and innovations as auto-fiction; flash fiction; the blog and the tweet, as well as uncategorized (and perhaps uncategorizable) texts as Vauhini Vara’s Searches, which alters the genre of autobiography by constructing a life story from the archive of the author’s Google searches. Visual and streaming technologies have given us long-form television series such as The Wire; the short-form innovation of the tick-tock dance, and the podcast. As this list suggests, new historical moments and new technologies give rise to new forms that may rely for their structural foundations or appeal to readers on familiar ones, sometimes invoking specific ties with these earlier genres, sometimes taking up a position—implicitly or explicitly—aligned with the past, opposed to the past, or as Thomas Beebee has argued, somewhere in the middle, between genres, both internally and externally. “[A]ll literature makes itself interpretable by referring to what it is not,” Beebee writes.
What kinds of relations exist between newer genres and traditional ones? How do newly innovative forms both depend on and revise familiar ones; how might the relation between the older and the newer help us understand the relation between past and present implicit in current works and the cultures that produced them? Is the idea of genre (either in general or in its particular manifestations) essentially nostalgic, looking back toward a world of fewer categories and greater stability, in the form of shared knowledge or agreed-upon aesthetic criteria? Or does the existence of genre and its theoretical traditions facilitate invention and innovation, giving writers and artists a shared background on which to draw? This special issue is interested in making explicit the temporal relations implicit in genre(s). Arguably, genres positioning themselves as “new” invoke and rely on traditional or existing genres, either for purposes of self-definition (Beebee’s “what it is not”) or legitimization; an appeal to genre may be understood as an appeal to a certain kind of authority, whether embraced or rejected; it may also be a critique of such authority.
This special issue will provide a forum for reflections on the relation between new generic formulations and traditional or existing ones. What is a project’s—or an author’s—attachment to, or disenchantment from—the strictures traditionally associated with a particular genre or genre theory in any of its manifestations? I invite essays, creative work, and reflections on these issues, including broader explorations of ways in which the genre idea has been influenced by technological change, cultural and political events, and disciplinary transformations. I also welcome inquiries about related topics not mentioned here. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- Continuities and Transformations: Is genre nostalgic? Do traditional genres serve as anchors for innovative work? Essays may consider the way the idea of genre in general and genres in particular have changed over time and analyze the significance of such change;
- Disciplines and Connections: Essays reflecting on the genre idea both within, between, and outside the disciplines of the traditional humanities, or an individual study that reaches across periods and cultures, with the goal of both exploring the concept and opening it up to new work and new meanings; this category would include essays considering the way in which apparently disparate genres may be seen as connected with and in dialogue with one another;
- Decolonization/Globalization: specific genres, as well as ideas of genre more generally, have been transformed by globalization in its various forms: political, economic, informational, aesthetic. Essays on the influence of globalization on specific genres or the idea of genre are invited.
- New work/reflections: examples of work that challenges traditional notions of genre, accompanied (if desirable) by authorial commentary. This category might (for example) include essays on the influence of AI or other technologies on specific genres or ideas of genre.
Please submit abstracts of 350-500 words along with a brief bio to a.jaffe@utoronto.ca by August 1, 2026. Standard analytic essays should be 6,000-8,000 words in length; non-traditional work will vary in length and form (please include details in the abstract). Inquiries about essays or other kinds of submissions are welcome; please contact the editor by email. The deadline for completed work will be March, 2027; all submissions will undergo a double-blind peer review process managed by ELN.