Queer Lives, Queer Texts: Literature, Identity, Desire, and Resistance

CALL FOR PAPERS

Queer Lives, Queer Texts: Literature, Identity, Desire, and Resistance

Erothanatos: A Peer-Reviewed Quarterly Journal on Literature

E-ISSN: 2457-0265

Volume 11, Issue 1 | Special Issue

Submission Deadline: 15 January 2027

Literature has long provided a space in which desires are articulated, identities are negotiated, bodies are contested, and normative structures are challenged. LGBTQ+ lives and experiences have increasingly become significant sites of literary and cultural inquiry, opening critical questions concerning sexuality, gender, embodiment, desire, identity, memory, belonging, marginality, resistance, and social transformation.

For Volume 11, Issue 1, Erothanatos invites original research articles and critical essays for a special issue titled “Queer Lives, Queer Texts: Literature, Identity, Desire, and Resistance.” The issue seeks to explore the diverse ways in which LGBTQ+ experiences are represented, remembered, imagined, silenced, contested, and reconfigured across literary and cultural forms.

The title Erothanatos itself invokes the enduring tension between Eros and Thanatos—desire and dissolution, life and death, intimacy and loss. Queer studies offers particularly productive possibilities for reconsidering these tensions: queer desire has historically been subjected to regulation, stigma, erasure, and violence, while queer literature has simultaneously created spaces of survival, self-fashioning, community, resistance, and alternative forms of futurity.

The special issue, therefore, welcomes interdisciplinary and theoretically informed approaches to LGBTQ+ literature and culture. Contributions may engage with queer theory, gender studies, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, postcolonial studies, affect theory, trauma and memory studies, medical humanities, disability studies, cultural studies, and other relevant critical frameworks.

Particular attention will be given to contributions that move beyond representational approaches to examine how literature itself produces, destabilises, and reimagines categories of gender and sexuality.

 

Indicative Themes

The following themes are suggestive rather than exhaustive:

LGBTQ+ identities and literary representation

Queer theory and literary criticism

Queer desire, intimacy, love, and sexuality

Gender fluidity, non-binary identities, and gender performativity

Transgender and trans literary studies

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and intersex narratives

Queer bodies, embodiment, and corporeality

Queer subjectivity and identity formation

Heteronormativity and its literary subversions

Queer resistance, rebellion, and political imagination

Queer trauma, violence, stigma, and survival

Queer memory, history, and archival absence

Queer temporality, futurity, and alternative life trajectories

Queer mourning, death, and the politics of loss

AIDS, HIV, illness, and medical humanities

Psychoanalysis and queer desire

Lacanian, Freudian, and post-Freudian approaches to sexuality

Butler, Foucault, Sedgwick, and contemporary queer theory

Queer affect and emotional worlds

Queer literature and posthumanism

Queer ecology and more-than-human sexuality

Queer and postcolonial identities

Queerness, caste, class, race, ethnicity, and religion

LGBTQ+ experiences in South Asian literature and culture

Queer narratives in Indian regional literatures

Queer readings of mythology, folklore, and religious narratives

Queer reinterpretations of classical and canonical texts

LGBTQ+ literature in translation

Queer theatre and performance

Queer cinema, television, and visual cultures

Queerness in popular culture and digital media

LGBTQ+ young adult literature

Queer children's literature and the politics of representation

Queer speculative fiction, fantasy, and dystopia

Queer fan cultures and digital communities

Censorship, banned literature, and queer expression

Queer publishing and literary communities

Intersectionality and LGBTQ+ identities

Queer politics of space, home, migration, and belonging

Queer diaspora and transnational identities

Queer masculinity and femininity

Queer feminism and feminist literary studies

Intersex representation and narratives of bodily difference

Queer disability studies

LGBTQ+ literature, law, and human rights

Contemporary developments in queer literary studies

 

Submission Guidelines

Word Limit: 3,500–6,000 words, including references.

Citation Style: MLA 9th Edition.

Submissions must be original, unpublished, and not under consideration elsewhere.

Manuscripts should be submitted in MS Word (.doc/.docx) format.

The manuscript should not contain the author's name, institutional affiliation, or other identifying information in order to facilitate double-blind peer review.

All submissions will undergo double-blind peer review.

Contributions should demonstrate clear engagement with relevant primary texts and appropriate theoretical scholarship.

 

We welcome contributions from scholars and researchers working in Literature, Queer Studies, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Sociology, History, Film and Performance Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and allied Humanities disciplines.

 

Important Date

Full Paper Submission Deadline: 15 January 2027

Publication: Erothanatos, Volume 11, Issue 1

 

Submission

Manuscripts may be submitted through the journal's online submission portal.

 

 

 

We invite critical engagements with queer lives, queer texts, queer desires, and the possibilities of queer futures.