"(Re)claiming Place and Space: BIPOC Legacy of Resistance in the American South"

WGS South 2025 BIPOC Caucus
Call for Papers
Deadline: December 10th, 2024

Since the inception of the South, BIPOC persons have found ways to claim and reclaim place and space. The South would not exist as such without the legacies of BIPOC persons. The South is a BIPOC place and space, acting as the birthplace of BIPOC culture throughout America. BIPOC persons living in or from the South have left legacies of resistance and cultural preservation. With the 50th anniversary of WGS-South, the BIPOC Caucus would like to honor the legacies of BIPOC persons living in or from the American South. We want to address the ways BIPOC persons living in or from the South leave a legacy for future generations of Southern BIPOC persons. Moreover, this call for papers seeks submissions for works that address how BIPOC persons leave a legacy of resistance and cultural preservation.

We invite submissions for an interdisciplinary collection examining the legacies of Southern BIPOC persons. This volume aims to amplify voices, stories, and historical contributions that shape our understanding of the region's complex cultural, political, and social dynamics.

Submissions may explore, but are not limited to, the following topics:

· Cultural Heritage and Identity: The role of tradition, language, and cultural practices in maintaining and reshaping the identities of BIPOC communities in the South.

· Historical Contributions: Accounts of BIPOC figures who have left an indelible mark on the fields of politics, literature, education, civil rights, and more.

· Generational Legacy: Stories of resilience, survival, and adaptation passed down through families and communities and how they continue to impact the present.

· Migration and Movement: How internal migration (both to and from the South) has influenced BIPOC communities’ cultural, economic, and social landscapes.

· Artistic and Literary Expressions: The role of art, music, and literature in representing the experiences of BIPOC individuals in the South, including issues of representation and self-determination.

· Activism and Social Justice: The historical and contemporary activism of BIPOC individuals in dismantling systemic oppression and the continuing fight for racial, gender, and economic justice in the South.

· Exploring additional Intersectional Identities: How additional identity markers (namely queer, disabled, trans, non-binary) maintain and reshape the identities of Southern BIPOC communities. Exploring how BIPOC persons with additional marginalized populations claim and reclaim the South.

"Crip Legacies"

WGS South 2025 - Disability Caucus
Call for Proposals
Deadline: December 10th, 2024

Members of WGS South launched a disability caucus in 2023 to establish a formal channel of communication within the southeastern region for scholars of disability studies, care feminisms, and crip theory, art, and advocacy. The disability caucus construes these topics as intersectional, necessary, timely, and urgent. At the 2024 conference and the pre-conference events leading up to it, we engaged with the aesthetic and everyday dimensions of questions about how to reconsider life from the perspective of disabled experience.

As the Disability Caucus continues to build momentum in WGS South, we seek to participate in those networks and to become one of those networks.

Collectively and repeatedly, we (re)considered matters of . . .

· grief, illness, loss, fear, anguish, and uncertainty;

· time, pressure, productivity, and rest;

· mania, depression, chronic fatigue, and mobility impairment;

· the politics and labor of caring (whether for ourselves or our partners, friends, colleagues, or even the discipline of WGS itself); and

· the abundant paradigm-shifting knowledge that circulates in disabled and crip networks.

For the upcoming 2025 conference, we call for proposals to join a panel on crip legacies. What are the crip legacies of feminist scholarship and advocacy in the southeastern United States and beyond? How might crip legacies outside of feminist scholarship and advocacy inform, enrich, or redirect this feminist work? What are the crip legacies we hope to leave for those who come after us? What legacies do we hope to undo, disrupt, eliminate, or otherwise crip?

A note on terminology: The word “crip” is invoked here deliberately, as it has been in a variety of scholarly and activist contexts over several decades, to enthusiastically name a particular strand of Black, queer, and feminist disabled legacies. This strand is characterized by (at least) three elements:

1) a contrarian spirit that does not consent to ableist biases, logics, or oppressions,

2) a contestatory stance that challenges and reconceptualizes the stories we tell within and about critical disability studies, and

3) an openness to disability beyond the usual understanding of the term, where a much wider array of bodily and institutional experiences can be recognized as disabled or disabling.

We encourage panelists to engage with this rich field of scholarship, whether revisiting early work in crip theory by Carrie Sandahl and Robert McRuer or exploring more recent contributions like Therí Alyce Pickens’s Black Madness :: Mad Blackness, Margaret Price’s Crip Space/Time, or the important collection on Crip Genealogies by Mel Chen, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich. To name only a few!

We will continue to celebrate the new Disability Caucus with a special event on Monday, Oct 21 at 3:00 featuring Margaret Price on her new book, Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life. (Duke UP 2024).A link for remote access will be provided soon.

Please email the Disability Caucus chair, Dr. Lisa Johnson (merrilisajohnson@gmail.com), to RSVP for this event.

"Trans and Queer Solidarity in Precarious Times"

WGS South 2025 - LGBTQ Caucus
Call for Papers
Deadline: December 10th, 2024

Trans and queer existence is under attack in the United States and in many places around the globe, particularly in the Southern US and the global south. In 2024 alone, more than 652 anti-trans and anti-queer bills have been introduced in 43 states. 45 have passed, and 123 are active and moving forward today, driven by conservative legislatures and non-profit groups including Project 2025 and Moms for Liberty. These bills are part of a larger authoritarian movement that seeks to ban gender-affirming care for minors (and even some adults) in myriad states. These same bills provide an exception for the performance of medically unnecessary, non-consensual “normalizing” surgeries and hormone treatments on intersex infants and youth. Additionally, these bills bar trans people from participating in youth, k-12, and collegiate athletics. Some of these bills subject parents to investigation by child protective services and can potentially remove children from their parents if they provide gender-affirming care. Other bills, such as Florida SB 1674, mandate that trans people only use the restroom that corresponds with their sex assigned at birth. Still others, such as Florida’s “Parental Rights in Education” bill ban the teaching of gender and sexuality in k-12 education and bar teachers from using a student’s preferred pronouns and nickname if it differs from the name listed on their birth certificate. Taken together, these coordinated attacks on trans and queer kids and adult’s rights to healthcare, education, bodily autonomy, and self- determination exemplify the authoritarian turn in contemporary conservative politics. This turn is grounded in an unscientific, strictly dimorphic sex binary which understands male and female differences as absolute and unchangeable, and is in turn based on colonial, eugenic, and sexological assumptions about the nature of human bodies that have been proven not only inaccurate but also harmful in trans and queer studies time and time again. This political moment calls for renewed interdisciplinary analytical attention to the stakes and outcomes of efforts to legislate trans and queer folks out of existence. At the same time, the moment is ripe for thinking critically about strategies of trans and queer resistance, solidarity, and social transformation.

This year’s LGBTQ Caucus welcomes creative and critical papers that provide new perspectives on the growing momentum of anti-trans and anti-queer political energies, as well as the resistance movements minoritized communities are building to counter them. What lessons do trans studies and queer theory offer for reconceptualizing the political climate and political economy of LGBTQ life under an increasingly authoritarian state? How is anti-trans and anti-queer sentiment shaped by racial capitalism, white nationalism, the unequal distribution of life chances and health outcomes under neoliberalism, environmental devastation, and technologies of misinformation and disinformation? How can trans studies and queer theory help us to craft: new models of care and communal resistance to curative, administrative, and other forms of violence; new strategies of organizing and opposition; new forms of solidarity, mutual aid, and coalition across our many differences; and new articulations of the affects and politics that might be useful for intervening in precarious times?

The WGS South LGBTQ Caucus invites papers that address these or related questions.

Please submit questions to WGS South LGBTQ Caucus Chair David A. Rubin at davidarubin@usf.edu.

"Student Leaders, Movement, and Activism"

WGS South 2025 Student Caucus
Call for Proposals
Deadline: December 10th, 2024

For years in history, we have seen student movements take place and unfold for movements that matter to them and the world. With those movements student leaders were the center of them all. Now we are calling on all student leaders and activists to share their ideas and what they are involved in the community that are helping make a difference. The work that they are doing to help learn from other leaders and where they are going from here towards change that we all want to see. WGS South would love to see what students are involved in and working towards. It is the best way to bring the young generation and older generation together and learn from each other. We want students to keep showing up and showing the passion they have towards change and a revolution.

If you would like your work and thoughts to be figured out at this year's WGS South 2025 Conference you can tag your proposal to be considered for a special Student Caucus panel. For more details and ideas click the link below and it will take you to the WGS South page.

Please feel free to reach out to the 2025 Student Caucus Chair, Mariam Shafik at mshafik@students.kennesaw.edu. https://wgssouth.org/conference2025