CFP: Out of Bounds? Queer Intercultural Communication

Special Forum Editor: Karma R. Chávez

There is immense potential for productive engagement between queer and trans studies, and intercultural communication scholarship. In the last decade, conversations in the humanities and social sciences have flourished on such issues as homonormativity, homonationalism, homocolonialism, gay imperialism, queer postcolonialism, queer necropolitics, queer cosmopolitanism, queer migration, queer political economy and queer borders. These discussions have revolutionized understandings of phenomena such as nationalism and imperialism, for example, by showing the profound ways racialized genders and sexualities work to challenge, uphold and promote them. Moreover, conceptualizations of citizenship have been radically rethought through queer and trans lenses to uncover the previously unexamined normativities upon which cultural and global citizenship is predicated.

Clearly, contemporary conversations in queer studies have significant implications for a vast array of communicative, mediated and rhetorical practices, cultural exchange and representation. Queer studies are tangibly and compellingly intercultural. Still, the intersections and interplays between the queer and the intercultural need to be explicitly explicated, elucidated, and elaborated within communication studies.

Accordingly, the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication is hosting a groundbreaking special forum that considers the broad intersection of queer studies and intercultural communication scholarship. We invite submissions that address, but are not limited to, the following questions: a) What do explicitly communicative approaches contribute to ongoing queer theoretical conversations?; b) What do these queer conversations bring to the study of culture and communication?; c) What intercultural communication phenomena might be most productively understood through a queer lens?; d) How can contemporary discussions of transnationalism, postcolonialism and hybridity in communication studies be challenged by queer perspectives?

For information about submitting your proposal, please click here.