CALL FOR PAPERS

CALL FOR PAPERS
Demeter Press
is seeking submissions for an edited collection
Chasing Rainbows: Exploring Gender
Fluid Parenting Practices
Co-Editors: Fiona Green and May Friedman
Publication Date: Early 2014
Feminist parenting creates unique challenges. Mothers may struggle with
shifts in their own subjectivity and the
peculiar conjoinment of parenthood. As women experience the unique
powerlessness of motherhood, they also hold
the uncomfortable power of acting as agents of socialization and social
control over their children. Fathers may feel
the desire for feminist parenting while experiencing a backlash and a lack
of support, while some parents may attempt
to resist the binaries of mothering and fathering in their feminist
parenting journey.
Feminist parents may attempt to resist gender binaries; they may submit to
them while attempting to foster critical
dialogue; they may struggle with the display of their own femininity and
masculinity or, for some, its perceived lack.
For some parents a dialogue about gender normativity may be inspired by
gender-diverse behavior on the part of their
own children, while others may parent children who happily submit to the
mainstream and query the need for gender
questioning. Chasing Rainbows: Exploring Gender Fluid Parenting Practices
attempts to cast a lens on the messy and
convoluted ways that feminist parents approach parenting their children in
gender aware and gender fluid ways. The
collection aims to draw together scholars, activists and community members
to open a conversation about the
challenges of exploring and maintaining an awareness of gender while
parenting in a highly gender normative world.
Because gender is expressed and performed differently in various places
and spaces, and across different ages, this
collection welcomes submissions from feminist parents and from the widest
range of experiences.
Possible approaches may include (but are not limited to):
• Cross-cultural, historical, transnational, comparative and
interdisciplinary modes of inquiry and analysis
• Gender fluid parenting within and beyond cisgendered mother and father
parenting roles
• The challenges and gifts of affective/psychic/embodied transformations
of gender fluid parenting
• Media representations and spectacles of gender fluid/diverse/variant
families
• Alternative visual and artistic depictions of gender variant
socialization in/of family life
• Racialization of gender variant parenting/family discourses
• Gender diverse self-help parenting texts
• Community based gender variant/diverse/fluid family activism and organizing
• Commodification of gender fluid and gender variant families
• Practical and theoretical ways of complicating and shaping fluid gender
expression
• Broad social and historical forces that impact what can be done and said
in the name of gender diverse families
Submission Guidelines
Abstracts should be 250 words. Please also include a brief biography (50
words) with citizenship.
Please send to: may.friedman@ryerson.ca, Ryerson University, 350 Victoria
St., Toronto, ON M5B 2K3
and f.green@uwinnipeg.ca, University of Winnipeg, 515 Portage Ave.,
Winnipeg, MB R3T 1M5.
Deadline for Abstracts is March 15, 2012 & Deadline for Acceptances is May
15, 2012.
Accepted papers not exceeding 15 pages (3750 words) will be due February
15, 2013
and should be formatted according to MLA guidelines. The book is to have
50 percent
Canadian content, so Canadian contributors are especially encouraged to
submit.
Demeter Press
140 Holland St. West, PO 13022
Bradford, ON L3Z 2Y5 Tel: (905) 775-9089
www.demeterpress.org / info@demeterpress.org