PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality is an anthology of essays edited by Carol Queen and Lawrence Schimel that is essentially a smack in the face to traditional and even some non-traditional ideas of gender and sexuality. It refutes any idea of any sort of binary along either of those lines.

Through reading the essays the reader gets multiple examples of people who don’t fit into the neat little boxes that both queer and het society tries to push them into. Because there are so many, one right after the other, each building on the next and each becoming more strange, more queer, more PoMo than the last, there is no way to deny that these people are not just flukes.

For me, I found some soulmates in this book. I found people struggling with the same ideas I do and asking the same questions I’ve been asking for years: where do I fit in if I’m sort of this and sort of that and everything and nothing? How do I navigate these gender and sexuality galaxies if I can’t pin myself down and comprehend where everything in me is coming from?

The essays in some cases are roads of self-discovery, showing just a glimpse of what one goes through when one box is not an option, and what is possible when you embrace not fitting in. Other essays were dissecting specific ideas or impulses that the authors had which were somehow out of their comfort zone, such as a gay man wanting to fuck a woman, how males and females can interact outside of a heterosexual paradigm, how a female can be a woman stuck in a man’s body, and various other pomo genders and sexualities.

If you’ve ever not fit into the boxes the world gives us, which is just about everyone in my experience, I would say you need to read this book. Even if you don’t identify directly with those in the stories it will blow your mind and make you reorganize your thinking about the way that gender and sexuality work. It will help you recognize that you are not alone, there are others like you who can’t fit into the boxes.

Even if you know that already, because I certainly did know that there were others who feel like I do going into it, you will still get a sense of camaraderie of validation that while you are unique in your own gender and sexuality expression there may be others who are just as or more fucked up than you are. And I mean fucked up in a good way, of course. ;)

Technorati Tags: anthologies, bibliophilia, Carol Queen, gender, gender fluidity, pomo, pomosexuals, sexuality

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Found via Subversive Submissive and thought I’d pass it along. I’m definitely going to add it to the list of things to write a piece for.

Bound to Struggle
Where Kink and Radical Politics Meet
Volume 3: Word Play
Call for Submissions – Deadline September 1, 2008

PURPOSE: To create a ‘zine that brings together the words of a diverse group of practitioners of both kink and radical politics

WORD PLAY: I’m interested in the words we use – when we are playing, when we are negotiating, when we are telling stories. The power/lack of language. The queering of words. The possibilities of words we thought were foreclosed to us. Reclamation, recreation.

YES: personal essays, comics, theoretical works, poetry; serious, funny, sexually explicit, fabulous, unfinished; clearly drawn art due to cheap copy machines

NO: grocery lists of anecdotes, using others’ names without their consent, photos (sorry, I don’t have the equipment necessary to replicate photos)

PLEASE: questions you may not have the answers to, analyses you can’t talk about in class or reading group, thoughts about power and sex that get more complicated the more they are dissected, turning readers on with your brilliance

SEND ALL SUBMISSIONS TO:

simon strikeback
1433 W. Lunt #IN
Chicago, IL 60626
s.strikeback@gmail.com

Technorati Tags: anthologies, bdsm, politics

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Something I’m thinking about writing a piece for, I’ll have to come up with a suitable idea first, but it would be something I could do. I don’t talk a lot about size issues in this blog, though I have been thinking about them more and more lately, and reading more fat/size-oriented blogs like Femme FATale (among others). The call for submissions was found on her blog:

Call for Submissions

Working Title: Spilling Over: A Fat, Queer Anthology
Contact: spillingover@gmail.com
Submission Deadline: December 1, 2008

Despite the attention given by queer studies to the materiality of bodies and the cultural and social inscriptions that designate them, still a dearth of both scholarship and literature exists around intersections of gender, sexuality, and fatness. As fat studies begins to emerge as a viable academic location of inquiry, questions surface as to how fat bodies, deemed “excessive” in their trespasses of size and space, create even more complex subject positions when compounded by queer desires. This proposed anthology seeks contributions addressing junctions of “fat” and “queer” in pieces that consider the representations and resistances of non-normative corporeality and also writings considering the theoretical conceptions of these intricate subjectivities. Spilling Over will reflect the notions of excess, boundaries, and containment implied by the labels “fat” and “queer” both singularly and collectively. In the form of scholarly writing and creative non-fiction pieces, essay submissions might consider (but are not limited to):

* theorizing the concept of “excess” as it pertains to fatness and queerness
* fat and queer identities; personal narratives; reclaiming “fat” and “queer”
* notions of (in)visibility, hypervisibility, and passing and/or privilege
* intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, (dis)ability, age, and religion
* the economics of the obesity “epidemic” and the diet industry
* fat, queer art and performance; performativity
* pleasure, sex-positivity, eroticizing non-normative bodies
* acceptance movements, political activism, resistance
* the engagement of feminism with fatness
* global, transnational, transcultural constructions of fat, queer bodies and lives
* critical reflections of fatness and queerness in media, literature, film, music, and visual arts
* the rhetoric of fat oppression, fatphobia, homophobia, transphobia, bigotry, responding to and/or addressing hate speech

By December 1, 2008, please send your 2,000 – 6,000 word submission, along with your complete contact information and a 50-100 word biography, to spillingover@gmail.com with the subject line of “Spilling Over – Submission.” Submissions must be received in 12 point Times New Roman font and sent in via Word documents (PDFs will not be accepted). Pieces will be reviewed and decisions made by April 2009. Please note that accepted submissions will be approved on a tentative basis, pending editorial board approval once the anthology has secured a publisher.

Questions can be directed to me at spillingover@gmail.com or visit the MySpace page at www.myspace.com/spillingoveranthology

Technorati Tags: anthologies, fat, queer

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Butch is a Noun is a book I’ve been eyeing for months, but have not actually gotten around to buying yet, by S. Bear Bergman. I found this youtube video of him reading the first chapter of the book, which is called What Butch Is, which I have been told is the best part of the book. You can even read along (or read again, or re-read or watch and then read along) with the PDF excerpt available at Bear’s site.

I am going to watch it a second time… and maybe a third and fourth and…

Along the same lines (of butch/femme) Visible: a femmethology has a call for submissions going on. It is due June 1st, and I am working on a piece for it, though I’m worried with everything going on and the trip and everything if I will be able to get it together in time. I’m hoping I will.

Some more information: “Visible: a femmethology is a forthcoming anthology about the power and complications in presenting femme as a gender and breaking the traditional meaning of feminine. It aims to showcase personal essays exploring what “femme” means to those who claim it as an identity.”

Much more information on their website

Technorati Tags: anthologies, bibliophilia, butch, gender, videophilia

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