Thursday, May 8, 2014

CFP: Transgender Studies Quarterly special issue on Tranimalities


TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2.2


Eva Hayward and Jami Weinstein, eds.

It has long been argued that Humanism has reached its breaking point and no longer possesses critical purchase (if ever it did); it would seem that it has not advanced our understanding of what it means to be “human,” especially if the humans we are theorizing do not fit neatly into well-known binary categories sanctioned by Humanism.  Further, Humanism delineates a normative standard of legibility by which all others are read, measured, controlled, disciplined, and assigned to fixed and hierarchical social statuses. This administration of norms is the justificatory linchpin of (often violent) practices of exclusion, discrimination, and oppression.

Since so many among us have been excluded from the elite status of being considered fully human in the restricted and universal sense that Humanism has articulated, researchers across a multitude of disciplines continue to unpack the underlying frameworks that provide for the standardizing force privileging the anthro-ontological Humanist human over all others. And this is one area in which transgender/trans theory, too, can make a significant intervention.

However, Tranimalities does not strive to provide yet another critique of Humanism simply by adding trans insights into the mix, or as yet another vector in intersectional critique. The abundance of theoretical interventions against Humanism’s investment in regulating and controlling sex/gender/sexuality has already made considerable headway on this front. Instead, Tranimalities wishes to focus on trans-infused apprehensions and engagements with the expansive world of possibility opened up by nonanthropocentric and posthumanist perspectives. In this way, Tranimalities aims to entangle and enmesh trans and the nonhuman in a generative tension leading to alternate ways of envisioning futures of embodiment, aesthetics, bio-politics, climates, and ethics.

As such, at the enfoldment of transgender/trans theory, critical animal studies, and posthuman theory lies a rich field of research that has to date been largely unconsidered. Tranimalities thus seeks to attend to the trans-dimensions of recent critical moves beyond the human. With works like Queering the Non/Human (Nora Giffney and Myra Hird, eds., 2008), Animal Others (special issue of Hypatia, 2012; Lori Gruen and Kari Weil, eds.), the Queer Inhumanisms (special issue of GLQ, forthcoming, Mel Y. Chen and Dana Luciano, eds.), and Tranimacies: Intimate Links Between Affect, Animals, and Trans* Studies; forthcoming, Eliza Steinbock, Marianna Szczygielska, and Anthony Wagner, eds.) providing some of the groundwork, TSQ’s special issue Tranimalities aims to contribute a specifically trans intervention into the discussion of the anti-, non-, in-, and posthuman.

We invite submissions of scholarly essays that address these and related issues.

Potential topics might include:

Transgendered posthumous life– what becomes of trans not only in the death of Man but also in the death of life?
“Transbiologicial body”: How are nonhumans contingent forms of trans bodies? Or, how does the trans body disrupt “the human”?
The animalization of trans populations as intersected with race, sexuality, nation, ability, and class
Transgendered anthropocene
Trans-species forms of hormonal and surgical lives
Becoming (with) trans-species
Transecologies and transenvironmentalisms: Does trans reinvigorate commitments to critiquing environmental racisms and classisms?
Posthuman trans embodiment and/or materiality – How does a special focus on matter and materiality transform trans understandings of bodies?
Is there a particular trans concept of affect?
Globalization and colonization, and the problematic of transing human/animal life?
The transanimal dimensions of political injustice and exploitation
What becomes of gender and, in turn, transgender in the absence of a human perspective?
Tranimalities and socialities
Trananimalities and engagement with disability studies
Multispecies ethnographies of transspeciation
What can transgender theory offer to scholarship about other Others and, in particular, nonhuman animals?
How does the position of transgender as other than in-, non- or posthuman give theorists a unique perspective from which to reconsider earthly life?
Trans-fat, transdermal, transfection, transfusion, and transposons, the undoing/redoing of “the human”
Bestiality/zoophilia/ “furries” as tranimal erotic formations?
Could the move to transgenre and away from transgender provide a productive opening to theorize posthuman or posthumous transgender
Transgenics/transplantations—How does the social aesthetic of transness shape and reshape biopolitical life?
Species differences as sexual differences?
Please note that this list is not intended to be exhaustive.

To be considered for publication, please submit full articles by June 1, 2014 to The expected range for scholarly articles is 5000 to 7000 words. Peer review will be conducted on all accepted submissions. Please prepare submissions for anonymous peer review by including your name, a brief bio, postal address, email address, and any institutional affiliation on a separate cover sheet. Please do not make references to yourself in the text, footnotes, or citations. We expect to give authors a response by August 15, 2014.  Final revisions will be due by October 15, 2014.

Any questions should be addressed by e-mail sent to both guest editors: Eva Hayward, and Jami Weinstein, and cc’d to

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is published by Duke University Press; Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker are general co-editors. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies, and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. Every issue of TSQ is a specially themed issue that also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces. To learn more about the journal, or to propose future issues, visit TSQ’s editorial page at