CfP: Global Queer/Trans Nightlives – Special Issue of Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture (Volume 31, 2027) Deadline: 02.06.2025
Call for Proposals: Global Queer/Trans Nightlives
Special Issue of Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, Volume 31 (2027)
Guest Editors: Paul David Flood, Alejandrina M. Medina, Christina Misaki Nikitin
As music moves, we groove. Or, perhaps more accurately, as queer/trans people in a musical world, we're moving with music across, through, and between nation-states, hemispheres, and a deeply interconnected and globalized world. Following Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, we are interested in how “The queer [and trans] world is a space of entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintance, project horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies” (1998, 558). And yet, we recognize that any queer/trans utopian project, the longing and desire for an alternative to our cisheteronormative world, must also be attentive to the stratification of intimacy, capital, and solidarity in our complex queer/trans worlds. Similarly, as nightlife scholars, we acknowledge that while partying provides a safe haven in which we can be ourselves and take refuge from the cis- and heteronormativity of everyday life it also serves to reject, regulate, and discipline marginalized queer/trans people. Thus, our attention to global queer/trans nightlife grooves in the interstices of race, class, ability, migration status, nation of origin, HIV status, and history of sex work while indulging in the simultaneity of promise, possibility, pleasure and their respective failings.
This special issue of Women and Music will both contribute and respond to recent scholarship on queer/trans nightlife in music and performance studies (Maus et. al 2018; Barz & Cheng 2019; Khubchandani 2020; Livermon 2020; Adeyemi, Khubchandani, and Rivera-Servera 2021; Garcia-Mispireta 2023; Leslie Santana 2025) by exploring the sensorial, musical, and political affordances of queer/trans nightlife on a global scale. By engaging music studies’ recent global turn, we consider the circulations of racialized and gendered agency in local and global contexts to decenter normative subjectivities across economies of music, sound, and performance. Attention to the global as a framework highlights the peripheralization of alternative definitions of queer/trans, performance, intimacy, and temporality across multiple geographies. By learning from those who party on the peripheries, this special issue will reveal how nightlife affords capacious, multiplicitous, and otherwise definitions of queer/trans, shedding light onto the complexities of identity formation and maintenance through musicking and performance.
We invite proposals for short article-length contributions (6,000-8,000 words) that may address one or or more the following topics/areas:
Musical performance in/and queer/trans nightlife spaces
Queer/trans nightlife and diaspora
Sexual economies in/of queer/trans nightlives
Modes of exclusion/inclusion in queer/trans nightlife (e.g. rainbow washing)
Conversations with DJs, drag queens, party organizers, and other nightlife laborers
Topics relating to globalization, glocalization, (neo)colonialism, and other transnational queer/trans politics
New methods in queer/trans theory, nightlife research, and/or music studies
Transnational tensions of different paradigms in gender and sexuality
Culturally specific and local conceptualizations vs LGBTQIA+ rhetoric
Projected Timeline
Mar. 31, 2025: CFP launch
June 2, 2025: CFP deadline
Aug. 2025: Decisions announced
Jan. 2026: Drafts due to editors
Mar. 2026: 1st round edits (internal)
Jun. 2026: Peer review
Dec. 31, 2026: Final submission date
We particularly encourage scholars based in Africa, Asia, Oceania and South America to submit proposals. All proposals and manuscripts must be in English.
Proposals of approximately 350 words, accompanied by biographical sketches of no more than 150 words, must be submitted through Google Forms by June 2, 2025.
Please send any and all questions about the call to the guest editors at globalqueertransnightlives[at]gmail[dot]com