The Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies invites sexuality and gender scholars working in any discipline or interdisciplinary area in the interpretive social sciences and humanities to submit area-focused manuscripts of no more than 10,000 words on any topic related to Decolonizing Sex and Sexualities. The highest quality manuscripts will be published as articles in a themed JMEWS issue in 2018.
Competitive manuscripts: 1) substantiate a thesis based on original scholarship; 2) are conceptually coherent and clear; 3) are grounded in primary sources (literary, visual, archival, textual, ethnographic, artistic, legal, and so on); and 4) engage with pertinent questions that emerge from region-focused and transnational sexuality and feminist scholarship.
We use the term decolonization to refer to the work of producing sexuality and feminist scholarship and theory focused on the specificities of the region. We seek manuscripts that challenge dominant notions of decolonization and postcoloniality in relation to sex, sexuality, and feminism; critically engage with scholarship and theory from the metropole; forge new or less travelled directions, including on non-normative and non-conforming embodiments and life; or address novel or taken-for-granted questions, including how to define queer and feminist.
Possible questions include: How do non-normative affects, forms of belonging, practices, and aesthetic configurations in the Middle East challenge theory’s often universalizing assumptions? How are sex, sexuality, and queer taken up or not in these contexts? How might modes of life, engagement and expression that never use such terms be theorized as queer, including from past historical settings and older texts? How do occupation, war, militarism, and displacement impact or produce specific non-normative practices, identities, and scholarship? What does the Middle East as an empirical focus offer sex, sexuality and queer theories?
Manuscripts that meet the JMEWS threshold of development will be submitted for double-blind peer review. JMEWS is committed to an efficient review process where most submitted manuscripts are resolved within 12 months. Please follow all JMEWS submission guidelines for article manuscripts, including for reference quality and style, transliteration, and word count. Manuscripts are due on or before June 15, 2017 to our online submission system. Questions may be directed to jmews@dukeupress.edu.